Primary View Rack

Cantabile
1

You may have noticed that the context menus for rack’s have an option “Primary View”:

In case you’re wondering what this is… each song can have one primary view rack. When a song with a primary view is opened, rather than viewing the song itself, the rack marked as the primary view is shown.

I thought this might be useful for the case where you have one monster rack file with all your plugins and your song files simply reference the rack and select the appropriate state. In this scenario (which is actually the exact scenario that the set list upgrade creates) I thought it might be more useful to open on the monster rack, rather than the parent song.

Does this make sense and is it useful? If not I might remove it.

2

I like this feature and would use it but would like to request a feature where we could pin a plugin window and force it to the top when each individual song was selected. There was a great feature like this in C2. I used it regularly.

3

@dave_dore, are you talking about this v2 feature:

If so, it’s logged here, but not particularly well voted on.

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@brad

No sir I meant this one

It probably had no votes… :smile: but I liked the Open on load and Always on top feature from C2

5

Oh right!

The Always on Top feature I dropped because the window handling of plugin editors changed in v3. In v2 they weren’t parented to Cantabile’s main window and could disappear behind it. In v3, they always sit on top of the main window.

I guess it might be handy to still have top most editors as this would let you keep plugin windows in-front while Cantabile goes to the back… but I think that’s pretty low priority.

As for open on load, I’ve been thinking it might be better implemented into the state management so that for different states, different plugin editors are open. Also need to figure out how this integrates with the in-place plugin GUI.

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@brad

Excellent, thanks for the answer ! I think that the open on load capability will be the same or better with what you propose.

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Yes, please, let’s have state-specific “open on load” - also inside racks. I’d love an automated way to open my S-Gear plugin in tuning mode by simply inserting a “Tuner” state either in some songs or as a dedicated song in my setlist.

In-place editing is not so important for this - happy if the tuner simply opens on top of the rest of the GUI. But it needs to CLOSE automatically when leaving the state/song as well.

BTW: @brad: there is still some quirkiness around plugins that automatically resize their windows. S-Gear does that, depending on the effects loaded into its virtual rack, and Cantabile can’t really keep up with correct re-drawing when a window grows or resizing the window when it shrinks. Maybe you could get the demo version (www.scuffhamamps.com) and test this (simply call up various presets) - is there a way for Cantabile to deal with this window resizing?

Cheers,

Torsten

8

Thanks Torsten, I’ve reproduced the S-Gear issue - I’ll check out.

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FYI: The problem with S-Gear is fixed in the next build. (3095)

I’ve tested with a few other plugins with re-sizeable GUI’s too and seems to be working across the board - let me know if you find others with issues.

10

Yes please!

Also being able to bring plugin GUIs up with triggers would be cool.

1 Like
11

That’s kinda interesting… I’ve never considered that before.

Question: should it be able to store different window positions for different songs/states.

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I guess storing different window positions might be useful, but I don’t personally think it’s something I’d miss if it wasn’t there. I imagine you’d also need some kind of mechanism for closing plugin GUIs too.

To put the suggestion into context, one thing I’d like to be able to do is have a tuner plugin in the global rack, hooked up to the audio input I have connected to my Minimoog. Then when I press a particular button on my controller keyboard, it pops up the tuner plugin GUI and mutes that audio input (after the plugin), so I can tune it in silence. Then press another button (or release the first button or whatever) and the tuner window goes, and the audio input is un-muted.

I currently do this (in Cantabile 2) with a stand-alone tuner plugin running outside of Cantabile, and using a separate sub-session that mutes the audio input and runs an external script to bring the tuner GUI to the front. But it’s a bit clunky having to go to a specific sub-session for it.

13

I think this use case could work if you’re only using the audio input for tuning. If you need to mute the audio input to other racks at the same time you bring up the tuner you wouldn’t be able to do that.

(Not sure I explained that well… being 1am and having coded all day).

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Yes, I was a bit hazy about how the muting would work. I guess an audio loopback channel might be one workaround.

15

We all commented on a built in tuner as well that is on the backlog list https://trello.com/c/7HQ6Qs9f/184-built-in-tuner-for-instrument-tuning. I agree that there are many available tuners (I like the S-gear Tuner) but… would having it integrated in C3 help address some of Neil’s requirements (selective muting) since the muting could be possibly controlled by special routines unique to the built in tuner or make it easier to access?

1 Like