Mute, Solo, Bypass, Suspend

[Neil_Durant]

@brad

Solo - I don’t think this makes sense for Cantabile. v2 had it cause every other music app had something like that, but I no longer think it makes sense.

I agree, it’s hard to think of a real use case for this in Cantabile (I don’t think the use case for solo on mixing desks / DAWs applies).

@brad

Bypass - currently v3 implements this by internally twisting the wet/dry setting to completely dry. It only affects audio. Should there be a button to bypass MIDI too, should it be the same button, should it be a per-plugin configurable option on the plugin slot?

I guess for completeness it would be good to have MIDI bypass, although I’m not sure I can think of many uses for it, at least for the way I use Cantabile (although I’d be interested to hear other people’s ideas here). If implemented it should definitely be a separate button though, per-plugin configurable on the plugin slot.

However, I’m a bit confused about the implementation using 100% dry - how does Cantabile know which inputs to map to which outputs?

@brad

Mute - v3 doesn’t have a mute button, but if it did, it could mean one of a couple of things - suppress the audio output of the plugin, or possibly more useful is to suppress the MIDI Input to an instrument. Both can be done already by disabling the routes to/from the plugin, but it’s not super intuitive.

Definitely it would be nicer to have a mute button rather than have to fiddle with routes - it’s like on a hardware keyboard rig when you find yourself having to unplug MIDI / audio cables to check something, and it’s annoying. Feels like the routes define the “circuitry” of the song/rack, and once set up I’d rather leave them untouched. I think I’m almost 50/50 on whether it should mute the audio output or the MIDI input, but with a slight leaning towards muting the audio output. The reason is that with muting the MIDI in, the plugin may “miss” an important incoming program/controller change, and so after un-muting it might not behave as expected.

@brad

Suspend - this means put the plugin to sleep, but should it also bypass the slot? I think not, since there’s already a separate control for this.

I agree, since you can separately bypass if you want to. However I’m unclear about what is actually happening to audio/MIDI if you have a suspended plugin that isn’t bypassed - if it simply passes through, how are the inputs mapped to outputs? (Same question as for bypass above - I’m probably just lacking a key bit of understanding of the architecture).