I’m thinking about a way to exchange sounds between users.
I work the way that I use mostly linked racks but also embedded racks. A rack can either contain just one sound without any rackstates (which are embedded racks) or several sounds with rackstates (which are linked racks). A “sound” is in most cases not only the tone-giving instrument itself but also the effects. I do heavy EQing on my sounds. So this is a mandatory part and this is the reason why exporting a program via the dialog inside the plugin is not sufficient.
I’d now love to have the option to export a rackstate. When importing the rackstate into a rack Cantabile will check for the VST IDs and if somethings missing it will bring up a dialog which asks if Cantabile should load this plugin. Of course the state will be automatically added to the rack-states.
What do you think about it? Does this makes sense to you?
Very interesting idea! I agree being that many of my “sounds” are quite dependent upon the effects applied with them. Having to perform several plugin preset saves and set everything back up afresh is a bit time consuming when/if one could be re-using rack states.
Hrm… this sounds like a messy can of worms. Let me think about this for a bit, but I suspect the correct answer to this is you’ve already got a rack that encapsulates everything about a sound, why not re-use or copy that already configured rack?
I’ve thought about it also and yes, there are a few things to take care about since not everything might be saved with the rack-state.
I just thought that this might be a good way to consolidate different racks quite easily. For example I’m working with Cantabile since 2 years now and I have many “pad”-sounds. But since I was not familiar with the workflow of C3 in the beginning I have tons of pad-sound-racks. If there would be an easy way to integrate them all into one linked rack, it would be quite nice. But I understand your concerns.
I’d like to follow up on this topic and get your thoughts and ideas about this.
What I think about is creating an online library for cantabile users. Mostly this library should cover all kinds of cover songs because we all know that keyboard player have most of the work when it comes to a cover-gig, most work is preparing. To avoid that I’d like to create such a library.
But lets say we have three songs. All songs are piano ballads. So if I now let the user download the song files, he has three songs that all contain the same piano. But this piano is of course loaded three times (because of embedded racks) instead of one time (linked rack).
So what is the solution of that? What do you think?
There must be a work around I think. It can’t be that if I have a set of 50 songs Cantabile will load every plugin over and over again.
Any ideas on that?
What f.e. happens if a song refers to a linked rack? Let’s say the user has the needed linked rack (with the piano samples inside) on his hard drive. But his linked rack doesn’t have the necessary rack-state the song wants to load. What happens when opening that song?
You could just have a Song library and a separate Linked Rack library and then have a requirement note on each song as to what racks were needed to work. That way the suppliers could keep the racks up to date.
Thanks for the input.
But that has drawbacks:
1.) The user then has a rack with tons of rack states he might not need.
2.) The library will be dynamic. So if the user makes changes to his linked racks and “updates” his linked rack with the one from the library all changes will be overwritten.