Duplicating Shared Racks

I’ve got a couple instances where I need multiple copies of a VSTI+EFX for certain songs. My initial approach was to simply create a new blank shared rack, exit Cantabile and copy the old rack, rename the new copy, then go back into Cantabile. Presto: two (or more) racks with the same features!

This seemed to work for a while, but recently I tried to do this with a couple of ‘virtual guitar rigs.’ Each rig contains an instance of a MusicLab VST (RealStrat, RealLPC, etc.); a filter/effect or two, and an instance of S-Gear 3. If I call up and existing song that uses the racks, I’m seeing lots of weirdness:

  • If I connect two racks with duplicate MIDI paths, one rack makes sound, while another remains silent. If I’m using 3+ copies of the rack, only one of them makes noise.
  • The silent rack is often the duplicate rack, but not always. Sometimes, the oldest rack goes silent.
  • If the VSTs in the silent rack have VU meters, they show audio when the v-guitar is played, but nothing comes out the audio pipe. This includes bypassing everything except the v-guitar.

I tried duplicating the racks using Cantabile’s built-in feature, but keep getting a message saying, “This song already uses a shared rack with this name,” or something similar. I eventually deleted the copies and recreated new shared racks from scratch, which works perfectly,demonstrating that it’s not a problem with a VST refusing to load multiple instances. But although it takes a lot of time to duplicate the path, bindings, presets, etc.

Anybody know what’s going on here?

Regards, Bruce

I believe there is “Save As” which will duplicate the linked rack with a new name. You could juat call them strat1, strat2, etc. or somthomg more descriptive strat clean, strat crunch, etc. You definitely need different names even if the content is identical

@raydyo They had different master names, ex: Les Paul A, Les Paul B. They probably had some duplication of internal names for VSTs, though, and the I/O names were the same.

The goal was not to use the LP Crunch / LP Clean approach, but to have 2 or 3 identical racks. That way, I wouldn’t have to remember any differences between amp locations, etc. Program 1 of the RealLPC would always call a vintage neck PU; Program 8 would always call a hot bridge PU. Same with amps: Program 4 of S-Gear would always be a Marshall lead tone, etc. I have the same thing on the synth side for my OBX and Octave Cat racks, since I often need duplicate synths or a split patch for a song, and cut-and-paste method worked there.

I was trying to duplicate the first rack because it has 5 VSTs and a fair number of bindings and filters. Also, the MIDI connections are complex, so that I can access different guitar, effect, and amp settings by sending a PC on different MIDI channels. The really strange part was that I could see the audio in the VU meters, but not hear it at the end of the chain.

I tried the Duplicate function and had problems; I’ll have to look into your Save As suggestion.

Regards, -BW

I’m not at my PC. “duplicate” might be what a I was thinking of as “save as”. I haven’t used it a lot, but certainly have used successfully for getting multiple identical guitar racks. I hear you about generic names like A and B. There is some benefit. I used more specific names to make it simpler to find the one I wanted when looking at a song. I want to mess with that clean sound. Is it A or B? If it is named “clean” I can go sttraight to it. The downside is that it’s the same stuff in the rack. I can go in and make clean as dirty a I want, so the name can become meaningless.

It probably depends on how an individual user thinks about programming. When I’m looking to add another guitar to a song, I want A and B to have all the same bells and whistles, in the same locations. This means that each rack has all the clean sounds, and all the heavy sounds. So the rack file gets a little bigger, I suppose. I found that while I had dozens of v-guitar programs, they tended to use the same amps and pickup positions, maybe with a different delay or chorus setting. I use the same reverb for 95% of my patches, too. I’ve simplified things by giving CH1-CH10 to the guitar VST, then using C11-C16 for up to six VSTs in the rack. I send bindings for guitar, effects, and amp at the start of each song loading.