I’ve two (sometime three) laptops accessing a shared cloud folder (e.g. Mega or Dropbox) and I’d like to keep the same in/out audio and midi ports shared as well. I’ve manually copied the “settings.json” file from a laptop to another one (in the Cantabile’s settings folder) but it doesn’t carry on those in/out settings. How to share those info between more computers and make it working? As said, copying “settings.json” didn’t remap those in/out ports in the target computer.
Also, the info here https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/guides/settingsFolder seems not to be updated, I see that a new Cantabile installation uses the folder “C:\username\AppData\Loca\Topten Software\Cantabile 3.0 (x64)” (not Documents)
UPDATE: I’ve copied ALL the files inside the Cantabile’s settings folder from the laptop 1 and pasted into Cantabile’s settings folder in laptop 2. Now I see all the in/out audio and midi ports are shared and imported. So, my question now is: where those info are located, in which file? Thank you.
(this is a snippet of my settings.json that defines MIDI ports)
I just tested this - made a change to audio and MIDI port names in settings.json with a text editor and started Cantabile afterwards - names were changed correctly.
Important: Cantabile overwrites settings.json on exit, so if you make changes to it directly, you need to make them while Cantabile is not opened.
If copying settings.json didn’t work, maybe Cantabile choked on something in it on the new machine and grabbed settings.lastgood.json (which still contained your old ports). So maybe a good idea to delete settings.json AND settings.lastgood.json before copying your settings.json from the other machine…
Of course there may be hardware differences between your three laptops that create problems with re-using settings.json on another machine, but for that we’d have to look deeper into your configs…
Adding to what @Torsten said, be sure you have the right config folder. You can point Cantabile to different directories. Are you looking at the right directory? Besides the user directories, I seem to vaguely remember Cantabile may use several different default directories (maybe different versions?) including it’s install directory:
C:\Program Files\Topten Software\Cantabile 3.0\
You might want to search out other settings.json files and rename them to something like settings.json.old or settings.json.20191024 (i prefer the dates in case I need to go back or trouble shoot). I’m always afraid to completely delete settings files, though.
Hi @Torsten thank you for all the useful info! Although, as said, I’ve copied evrything from the laptop 1 to patop 2 and I got all the settings copied. No conflicts. On my first attempt, I’ve copied only settings.json file and it didn’t work, don’t know why (we know computers…
Thanks @RackedBrain for the suggestion. Yes, I’ve checked and opened the right folder via Cantabile’s Tools>Open Settings Folder to be sure where the setting files where located on both computers. And also, as said, I’ve discovered that by default Cantabile setup installs setting files into:
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Topten Software\Cantabile 3.0 (x64)
Settings are just there, not in Documents, Program Files or wherever. Then, sure, that folder can be changed but that’s a second step.
Yes, that’s why I suspected that maybe Cantabile brought back the settings.lastgood.json due to a conflict or something. But difficult to find out in hindsight, now that the settings have copied successfully…
Any chance Cantabile was running when you copied the file? When you then closed Cantabile it would have overwritten the newly copied settings.json with whatever Cantabile already had loaded and effectively undone the copy.
The audio and midi port settings are definitely stored in settings.json and so long as the file is valid (ie: not JSON syntax errors) it would have used what’s in there. Cantabile never automatically loads the settings.lastgood.json - you need to manually rename that to settings.json if you want to revert to those settings.
Thanks @brad for confirming it. Well, now I don’t remember if Cantabile was open when I copied the file in the folder. I’ll try it again. I’ll delete all the in/out ports from laptop 2 and copy only the settings.json file again from laptop 1. I’ll let you know later…
I’ve resetted the Settings folder on destination laptop 2 (I saved a copy of the Cantabile’s original settings folder) and just replaced the settings.json file from laptop 1: all the audio/midi ports are now shown exactly on laptop 1 (source) and laptop 2 (destination).
