I am about to make myself a small mixer rack with the intention to standardise look and feel of different songs as well as having a one-off setup of midi assignments, media players, some basic effects etc.
Within the rack it is basically all about routing, which works so good in CB3.
(It seems though I have to use a plugin per “node” where I am using a very simple and free EQ plugin, which btw. is bypassed)
The challenge comes because I also would like to have an insert possibility per channel, i.e. be able to route audio out of the rack, into an effect and back into the channe/rack again.
While it is simple to define audio ports for the rack and do all the internal routing I am not allowed to use any external plugins because CB3 claims there will be a circular reference.
On plugin level this is of course true but in this case though audio is routed to different ports and there is no closed loop (if I avoid to make mistakes inside the rack)
Is there any way to overcome this “limitation” in CB3 or somehow tell Cantabile to ignore the check for this specific situation?
Not sure I’m following exactly what you’re trying to do. Can you send me a copy of your rack and exactly where things are falling apart. A couple of questions, comments
Do the inserts need to be in a separate rack? Could you not handle this all within the rack.
If you do want these in a rack, would an embedded rack cover it? With embedded racks you can always route to/from the racks input/output ports.
Re: using a simple plugin bypassed - sounds like you’re just using the plugin as a routing target. Once idea I’ve been considering is a new slot kind called something like “Routing Point” - an object with a configurable set of input/output ports and mapping between them. You could sit one of these in a rack to de-couple plugins and make swapping out plugins easier.
I don’t think removing the circular reference checking is a good idea - Cantabile’s route manager would probably implode on itself.
Attached first is my test rack with two inputs and two inserts.
My basic idea is that either one can route audio from the input-, via the insert- to the output channel OR
One can take a detour out of the rack (Insert send) and back again into Insert.
This is very much like many mixers have.
But as you can see in the test song the routing on song level out-and back into the rack causes a circular reference, even though in this case it is not.
I guess “yes”. Otherwise it would not be much of a mixer
Good point. It could be an idea not achievable in normal mixers.
Good idea.
As a final note I actually decided to go away from this solution.
Due to CB3’s magnificent routing functionality I decided to do insert effects on Song level rather than mixer-rack level.
The mixer is now a 10 input machine with two effects send and assigned CC controllers.
The user interface might not be the best but it works fast and reliable and is still, in my opinion, well structured and easy to plugin into new songs.
