Beta Available: Tabbed and Split Views, Multiple Window Layouts and Tab Sets

brad · October 3, 2025, 7:59am

Hey All,

I’ve just put up a very experimental new build of Cantabile with tabbed song/rack/plugin views + split mode + multiple windows layouts + saved tab sets + more.

There’s a previous discussion about all this here.

I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to test it, but I’m going to be travelling interstate for the next week and I’m putting this up now so you can start playing with it.

It should be considered very experimental. I’ll be monitoring this topic while away and any minor issues I’ll try to address while on the road.

Download 4321 Here.

Brad

Tabs

There’s now tabs for set list grid, show notes, song, racks and docked plugins:

Table / Diagram / Bindings Picker

To switch between views on a song/rack use these selectors:

If you Ctrl+click on one of these buttons the view is opened in a new tab rather than replacing the view in the current tab.

Closing Tabs

Tabs can be closed by the X on the tab itself, or by Ctrl+W, or by View menu → Close Tab

Split Mode

You can split the main window horizontally or vertically either with this menu:

Or by context menus on the tabs:

When split, there’s an additional button on the right/bottom panel to close split mode:

Window and Tab Set Management

There are new commands for saving window layouts (the geometric layout of the main window) and tab sets (the set of currently visible tabs and any displayed popup plugin editors):

Window Layouts are saved globally
Tab Sets are saved with the song

You’ll also notice the View menu has been re-arranged to hopefully make things cleaner.

Live Mode

Live mode maintains its own “tab set” and can only reference the well know tabs such as show notes, set list grid, song views, background rack views. Not racks and not docked plugins.

If you want a song to show a particular set of tabs when in live mode, you can select one tab set as the “live mode” set. When a song with a live mode tab set is loaded, that tab set will be used instead of the normal live mode tab set.

New Save Song and Racks Command

Since songs save the currently selected tab, you might want to save a song with a particular rack or other plugin active and since the normal Save Song command gets changes to Save Rack when a rack is active there needs to be a way to save the song. “Save Song and Racks” does this:

Option to not re-open plugins

There’s a new option to enable/disable re-opening plugins when loading a song or rack:

Plugins with Editor Visibility State Behaviour

For plugins with the “Editor Visibility” state behaviour enabled, none of the above regarding tab sets or re-opening plugins affects these plugins. Their visibility is still strictly controlled by states.

Bindings

There’s a bunch of changes to bindings to support all of this:

Any bindings that switch main window views (eg: view set list grid etc…) now have an option to choose which split panel: active, primary (ie: left/top) or secondary (right/bottom).

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If you’re looking for bindings to switch tab sets or window layouts they’re in “Execute Command → UI Command → View…”:

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The_Elf · October 3, 2025, 9:44am

I’d rather have this the opposite way around.

Anyone else?

dave_dore · October 3, 2025, 3:57pm

On my test rig Ctrl+Alt+F1 starts the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel and does not call up the 1st tab set. I have a Dell Optiplex with integrated Intel graphics. Not sure how to disable it but the focus was on Cantabile when I attempted it. So far I’m liking it, lots of view and layout capability to absorb here.

dave_dore · October 4, 2025, 12:21am

OK, it broke a custom button set of bindings in a rack that were supposed to open the rack editor and focus on the routing view inside the rack but now does not. When the button is pressed the view remains at song level in the current song where the rack is loaded.

@brad It’s easy to see how this could conflict since you are dealing with views, let me know what you think. I may need to re think the bindings necessary to do this, I will investigate.

If you save the rack I used for example with the new version it will not work in the older versions so if you have bindings like mine in a rack back your files up before experimenting with 4310.

I also note that when you open a rack with a double click it opens in a new tab, I assume that’s the new default behavior? I ask because in single pane view it used to open in the same pane (or single tab now). This is different than the behavior for the bindings, routing and diagram view switches which default to the same pane and require a control click to open a given view into a new tab and different than the old behavior in previous versions since we had no tabs. @The_Elf referenced this in his post above and unlike him I like that you preserved the original view behavior until a ctrl + click sequence was used to open tabs. I guess it was a choice of a new default behavior of open a new tab for any view button you hit or the old default of keeping the same pane in focus with no new tabs.

It also leads to another question. I use utility racks that are in all my songs that do fades and mixing and setups for for external hardware. The new tab and split view system is great for setting up these racks per song. The issue I run into is I have a great number of songs and need the tab setups for these rack editor views to be available to pull up in each song as I edit them and you have the tabs saved per song meaning I would need to set the view up manually in each song. Would it be possible to save (export) a tab set file that could be imported into existing songs and contained the unique tab sets I would need for my view setups? The idea is they would only load if the rack(s) that were referenced in it were loaded in the song and would otherwise abort the operation.

brad · October 4, 2025, 11:06am

Hi Dave,

Thanks for testing this for me.

Caused by 2 bugs now fixed in 4312 (here)

Also, out of curiosity are these bindings in the smoothie rack, or somewhere else. Why not put the open rack editor binding in the smoothie rack itself?

Yes, correct. That’s kind of the point of tabbed mode. (Otherwise you’re back to having to have an eject button to go back).

I’m a bit reluctant to move tab sets externally to the song because I’m worried the system is a bit too complicated already. Instead of relying on tab sets for these kinds of scenarios wouldn’t it be better to use bindings in the racks to open what you need.

That said, import/export of window layouts and tab sets is probably reasonable… anyone else want this?

The_Elf · October 4, 2025, 11:39am

It just seems a bit of a shame that I have to hold Ctrl to open a bindings tab. No big deal, but just disappointing. I suppose I’ll get used to it…

dave_dore · October 4, 2025, 12:49pm

yes, the bindings are in the smoothie rack.

Thanks for the fast turnaround, I’ll check it out.

Update:

I checked out 4312 and the issues I had with the custom buttons is fixed!

The Ctrl+Alt+F1 tab set shortcut is still popping up the intel graphics control panel GUI.

dave_dore · October 4, 2025, 1:18pm

I see your point but I thought that that behavior would quickly populate the tabs area with views and the old behavior confined things to one pane. Maybe this could be an optional behavior that could be in the options area, i.e the current behavior and the proposed behavior you would like. @brad ?

Derek · October 4, 2025, 5:54pm

Looks great, but I am deep into rebuilding my set for my next gig in early Dec, so not sure how adventurous (bleeding edge) I want to be on this new UI right now…

brad · October 4, 2025, 10:55pm

Would you want it to;

a) open a new tab every time you click it? Or
b) would you expect it to switch to another tab of the same type if already open?

If a) then I think you’ll just end up with tabs everywhere. If b) then you’ve pretty much just replicated the functionality of the main tabs.

These buttons really were designed as “view switchers”, not really buttons to open panels. The Ctrl+click was added as a short cut to duplicate tab + switch view.

I’m still open to changing this if enough people find it irksome.

OK, if you use Rack → View Editor (rather than rack by name/index) the binding will continue to work even if the rack is renamed.

Great

I don’t think there’s much I can do about this. The driver software is probably installing a hook to detect that key before Cantabile ever sees it.

What I can do though, and want to do, is pick a better set of shortcuts for those commands (load layout and load tab set). I’d prefer them on the number buttons (instead of function buttons) but those keys with shift are currently internationalized so different across different machines.

I’ve got two ideas here:

Fix it so you can set a short cut of Shift+1 instead of “!”. and/or
Two stroke hot keys because the set of unused available keys is starting to run low. eg: Shift+W then 1 to load layout 1.

In any case, in the meantime, you can remap these keys in Tools → Options → Hot Keys if you like.

Brad

The_Elf · October 5, 2025, 6:28am

It’s just that I’ve gone from simply clicking on the always available, and easily found in the middle, ‘Bindings’ word to having to hold down Ctrl and find that tiny icon over on the right.

I suppose the bright side is that I can now leave the bindings tab open as I work on a song.

dave_dore · October 5, 2025, 8:26am

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the tip.

Yep, that was it. The Intel app was picking it off before Cantabile. I found the hot key settings for the Intel Graphics Control panel and it had 3 functions tied to Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+F11 and Ctrl+Alt+F12 as defaults.I was able to change them and now have Cantabile’s hot keys working for tab sets.

I’m in good shape now from changes I made to the other apps hotkeys.

Thanks again for the assistance.

I am really liking the new view features. I sometimes need at least 3 views to quickly program my Smoothie rack for fades and this makes it a breeze. I dreamed of this and now it’s here.

Dave

Torsten · October 6, 2025, 1:49pm

Just had a bit of time to play with this - great stuff! Will be some time until I make full use of this, but extremely promising!

Just a Q: is there a way to change the order of tabs or is there an inherent priority that can’t be changed? I assume that currently it is songs → racks → docked plugins. But it seems that the sequence between similar type tabs, e.g. between racks is the sequence they were opened in?

I’d love to be able to change the order of tabe; currently, the only way is to close them and then re-open in the sequence I want - a bit clumsy, _IMHO. Or am I missing something?

Cheers,

Torsten

Derek · October 6, 2025, 5:50pm

+1 - similar to what I do in browsers to have a logical flow

brad · October 6, 2025, 10:54pm

Re-ordering is a good idea.

When I first started on the tabs I wasn’t planning on including savable “tab sets” so it seemed there’d need to be some sort of implicit order. Now they’re savable it makes sense for them to be user re-orderable.

dave_dore · October 7, 2025, 4:49am

@brad I have a few new issues to report. When a Rack is transferred to the lower pane and you put it in focus and then open the states tab it shows the correct states for the rack but when you select a state it doesn’t switch and instead switches to the Song States (Parts) list and the last invoked state it was in and the focus is not on the rack anymore. In effect it loses the focus of the rack in the lower pane. FWIW I was using the Background Rack when this occurred first so I used several racks to test and they all did the same thing.

Also it appears that the Page Up for the show notes is not working either. The up and down keys work fine and the Page Down key works but not the Page Up.

ADDENDUM:

I also notice that when I save & close a song with the view below showing a rack view tab in the lower panel …

opens as show notes on the same panel when I load the song the next time.

I also notice that on song load it shows the set list grid first for a few seconds and then loads the set of panels you saved the song with. This may be expected behavior but I thought I’d chime in on it.

Another question I have is do the last saved views include the field dividers on the tabs on the lower or alternate panel? The primary panel saves the field positions fine but not the lower panel objects. I set the width to see all the fields and save the song and the tab set and close. When I reopen the fields are collapsed to a default width.

saved as

when I reopen the song

Is this expected behavior?

V 4312

Thanks,

Dave

brad · October 7, 2025, 10:22pm

Hey @dave_dore

Thanks for reporting these issues… I’ll investigate asap.

Brad

brad · October 7, 2025, 10:32pm

Hey @dave_dore Can’t reproduce this… are you sure you don’t have another action bound to Page Up (eg: a binding for that key, or perhaps something in Tools → Hot Keys)

brad · October 7, 2025, 11:02pm

I can’t tell from your screen shots - are you in Live Mode? Live mode doesn’t re-open rack views because they can’t be shared across multiple songs and live mode tries to keep the same view across all songs. If you want a particular song to re-open a particular set of racks, then create a tab set in that song and mark it as the “live mode” tab set.

If not live mode, then I can’t reproduce this. If you reduce this to a simple song/rack combination that shows the problem and send me a copy and I’ll see if I can figure it out.

brad · October 7, 2025, 11:14pm

Fixed in 4313

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