Is anyone using divisimate with cantabile? I’m guessing that it simply shows up as a bunch of midi inputs that can be routed like anything else. But, as this would be running outside of Cantabile, I’m wondering of I would be able to change divisimate presets and bypass from Cantabile songs and states.
I’ll answer my own question in case anyone is interested. You can email divisimate and get a free 1 week full trial. i fired it up today and it is working great. I wanted it specifically for SWAM. I love the SWAM instruments, but other than just using a solo instrument or two. SWAM is not real condusive to live performance. Divisimate helps a lot.
It’s a bit of work to get it all going at first. They give you templates for SWAM. It can spread a chord out to as many as 32 instruments. In the template for SWAM 30 are used for SWAM Instruments. When you start up cantabile you will need to add Divisimate’s 32 midi ins. It helps to name the ports to match the assignments in Divisimate. “DM01 Piccolo”, for example. I made 5 linked racks for 1st & 2nd violins, viola, cello, and double bass and connected them to the appropriate midi input ports. With Divisimate’s String quintet program I can play up to 5 note chords and the notes will go to the appropriate racks.
It’s going to take a while to build all 30 racks, but I think that once the initial work is done it will be fairly easy to make variations. 5 string sections at once is only consuming a few percent of CPU on my I9 laptop.
The way Divisimate allocates the notes is via presets. You need to enable Cantabile to talk to Divisimate’s loopback port. This has nothing to do with a Cantabile loopback port. You alo need to enable the loopback port in Divisimate’s settings. For some reason they chose not to use midi program change. You send CC31 (1 to 100) to select presets. 100 seems like a lot, but they provide 2 banks of 100 just for SWAM templates. I set up a new folder to hold just the presets I use. There is only 2 in there now, but I expect rapid growth here.
You can send the Divisimate preset to the looback with a binding on song or state load. Maybe binding to a knob or buttons could also be useful
You connect your controller to Divisimate rather than Cantabile, though there doesn’t appear to be anything preventing both connections at once.
The only downside I see is that Divisimate is not a vst. It is a separate program running outside of Cantabile. I have set up Cantabile to start up Divisimate as an external exe when Cantabile starts. I haven’t figured out how to shut it off when I shut down Cantabile. If you restart Cantabile with Divisimate already running you get an error message about it already running. I think I discovered that if I don’t respond to the error message then things get squirrely.
Getting long winded here for something maybe no one cares about. Once I am sure it’s all reasonably stable I would be happy to share whatever Divisimate and Cantabile templates I come up with. Let me know if there is any interest.
-ray
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