Yesterday during practice I had a PC hard lock and had to power off the Surface in order to reboot. When I launched Cantabile after restarting, it acted as if it was the first time I was using Cantabile and prompted me with all the welcome tips. Also, all of my input/output settings were GONE, so all of my routes were broken. I had to manually add my keyboard, foot controller and guitar input/speaker output again. Then reassign to each route to restore my functionality.
Is there anything I can back up in case this happens again to āinstaā restore my settings? I canāt imagine that happening live and not being able to get everything up and running again immediately.
The abstraction for the ports is great, but in this instance, I still had to select my new ports on each of my plugs.
I have also had that happen to me. (Luckily, at just a practice and not a paid performance. But it was still pretty stressful.)
It seemed to me that the settings.json file (or the data contained in it) got corrupted. I managed to find a backup of the settings.json in a crash dump. Since then, I have made sure to keep up-to-date backups of all of the configuration files and of the folders containing my rack, song, and set list files.
Iāve heard of this happening a couple of times and the only real resolution at the moment is to either restore settings.json from a backup, or recreate the settings.
Itās a valid point though that this is a problem if it happens during performance and the only reason Cantabile doesnāt do something more resilient is because it should be exceedingly unlikely for the file to become corrupted - Cantabile opens the file, writes it and closes it.
Perhaps it should keep a ālast known goodā copy of the settings file to fallback to in a case like this.
Great idea Brad. Could save someoneās behind during a live performance of the unthinkable happens or just save a bunch of time of it happens elsewhere.
This has just happened to me for the second time yesterday. On both occasions it was when I tried to update Cantabile from the Tools menu. The updater couldnāt shut down Cantabile (I hadnāt saved a recent change to something) so I had to do it manually. I then updated normally but all the settings file info was lost unfortunately.
The ālast good copyā was from quite a while before, though I didnāt know how to get Cantabile to read it. Do I change the name? I tried to use a copy from one of the zip files that are in the Cantabile folder but it wasnāt recognised. How do I save the current settings - just manually drag a copy somewhere safe? Could this be a menu option in the future?
Iāve redone all the necessary settings stuff now, and will avoid updating from inside the programme in case this is a small (if annoying) bug.
Thanks for leting me know about this. Iām not aware of any specific problems here but Iāve not really tested running the installer while Cantabile is already running - Iāll check it out.
In the meantime, if your ālast goodā settings file was old then you were probably in the wrong settings folder. Cantabile writes that file after every time it successfully opens it. And yes, just rename it to settings.json to have Cantabile read it. Similarly for extracting a settings file from a crash file - that should work too, just place it over the existing file. If thatās not working again, you must be in the wrong folder.
As for backing up/restoring this file - yep you can just take a copy of the file and place it somewhere else.
Is this the correct folder: User/app data/local/topten/cantabile? My new settings file is there but the ālast goodā is from August 2016. I tried replacing the settings file from the most recent crash file but although Cantabile opened they werenāt the settings I expected to see from the date of the file.
Iāve reset everything now and will manually keep a BU. Might it be possible in a future update that the settings file could be saved from the File menu? Incidentally, after the crash all other aspects of my setup were fine so just the ins/outs (and the associated renaming/aliases) were missing.
Yeah thatās the correct folder location, but you need to double check that last folder name - depending on which edition of Cantabile your running (x86 vs x64) and also whether youāre using a custom configuration name.
Thanks Brad. Iād found the folder from the Tools menu and the old August 2016 ālastgoodā was in there. I deleted it and renamed a copy of the settings file as the current ālastgoodā file. Does that work? In any case Iāve made the folder visible so that I can easily make a backup (along with the other Cantabile folders) in case of a future crash. Iād always backed up the others anyway. What are the other settings files in this folder - the .3179/.3200? I deleted the other zip files keeping only the most recent ones, though the settings file from the Jan 2017 folder couldnāt be read either. All is fixed now but itās good to have some info to try and avoid future problems, or at least have a quick solution available.
(Sorry for the slow reply - been travelling all yesterday)
The settings.lastgood.json file is a backup of the last known good set of settings. So you need to copy that to settings.json to restore it. Similarly if youāre restoring settings from crash zips then you need to just replace the settings.json file - not the setting.lastgood.json. (Note you have file extensions hidden in your screen shot so you canāt see the .json part of the file name)
As for the .3179 and .3200 files these are backups of the settings files as they were the last time you ran those build numbers before upgrading. When you update Cantabile, itāll automatically backs up the existing settings file the first time you run it. This is because occasionally the format of the settings file changes and if you want to go back to an earlier build, you can switch to those files if necessary (itās generally not).
Thanks Brad, a very comprehensive reply. If I have another corrupted settings file Iāll certainly be able to restore things very quickly. Iāll avoid updating from the running programme until you have time to check that out. On the two occasions itās happened I think the problem might have been that I hadnāt saved a recent edit, so the updater couldnāt close Cantabile.
