I’m using Cantabile Performer 3.0 and spent a LONG time creating a large number of bindings in the Background Rack to perform control logic on a MIDI controlled lighting board.
I fired up Cantabile today and all of these bindings are gone. Many bindings in the Background Rack remain (for other purposes), but all pertaining to this particular function have vanished.
Is there a known reason why bindings would disappear from the Background Rack? Could they still be there, unseen? Could a missing hardware port cause this? Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated.
I’m desperate for a fix. The thought of having to recreate this from scratch has me extremely depressed, and the holidays have me depressed enough as it is.
The bindings aren’t in a collapsed group. In fact, the ones that disappeared were in the same group as others that are still there.
I only have one background rack and one settings configuration. I’ve looked for others at your suggestion, but none exist.
Having to recreate all of this work is bad enough, but I’m even more concerned that if it happened once, it will happen again. I need to know that I can rely on the software and that the problem is me and not Cantabile. The bindings were there. They were solid for several weeks of use. Until one day when I closed the program and shut down my computer. A few days later, I turned on my computer, launched Cantabile using the same single and only shortcut I’ve ever used, and the bindings were gone.
The only thing I did was change the physical USB ports that some of my keyboards and interfaces were connected to (I replaced my USB hub with a larger one).
That sounds really strange. Only thing that I can think of is if somehow your background rack was replaced with a backup where the new bindings were not (yet) created. Do you by any chance have backups available of your setup?
The USB hub change should not affect any of this, but stranger things have happened.
I hope that some of the more experienced users will be able to give better advice than mine, I will try to see if I can think of anything that might help or explain this.
Regarding the question if you can rely on the software, I believe that there are quite a few users that uses it extensively in a professional setup, and they have never reported issues like this, so I would say yes, but get concerned when there are two reported occasions with bindings that appear to disappear.
Are you closing Cantabile after any session? Or are you leaving it running without closing (I am surely doing this! I just hibernate the pc…). In this case, are you sure Cantabile was closed regularly before shutdown?
This might or might not be related but may be a hint to disappearing bindings –
Sometimes when i copy bindings from one song to another i find that some have gone missing, when the source (or maybe it was the target) doesn’t exist in the new song. So it’s not impossible that (hypothetically) a device not being found where it’s expected (Windows is known to sometimes rename USB devices when switched to another port) might cause the binding to disappear.
Generally, you should be able to rely on Cantabile - I’ve been using it live for years now and it hasn’t let me down.
Note: the background rack is pretty similar to any other linked rack, so it is contained in a file in your Cantabile config directory. You can make regular backup copies of your background rack file, and maybe with versioning to insure against accidental overwriting of the correct one.
I keep my background rack with my other racks in a Dropbox folder, so all the backup and versioning is taken care of automatically. To have the background rack outside the config folder, you need to make a change in Cantabile settings:
You need to change this setting to where you put your background rack - on my studio and live machines it is the dropbox\cantabile\racks folder. Makes it easy to keep the changes I make to my background rack in sync across my machines…
This is what I was originally thinking. I’ve tried to recreate my old setup exactly as it was in hopes that the bindings would reappear. No luck so far.
I’m basically blaming myself for not making a backup. I’m not by any means an expert on Cantabile and still have a lot to learn. I’m going to study maintaining multiple configurations and setup management. Thanks for the screenshot and reply.
Your post about changing the background rack location helped me out a bunch. It sounds like I’m trying to do what you are doing: Have a duplicate Cantabile machine at a practice location and at home. One less “thing” to tear down, move, and set up. Making the input/output aliases the same on both machines allowed the inputs and outputs to “find each” other across machines, but the background rack was a disaster until I copied from the default locations.
To be clear, is there any reason not to move the background rack folder to the MyDocs/Cantabile folder? If the background rack is in the same folder in MyDocs, the cantabile files would be very easy to thumb drive back and forth.
No reason at all - I have moved my background rack to my Cantabile “Racks” folder. My Cantabile folder lives in my Dropbox, so no need to shuffle back and forth via thumb drive - dropbox takes care of keeping both machines in sync. Highly recommended!
