This is not good at all. But thank you very much for your replies.
You still have not gone into detail how you wanted to use this combo. Elaborate a bit and we might be able to find a workaround.
Did you get to play with the Cantabile recorder any? It is as good as any DAW, and the MIDI and audio files it makes import into a DAW as multiple tracks very nicely.
Terry
Not sure why “this is not good” - we’ve tried to offer you options to use Cantabile in connection with your DAW; it seems that you are very much set on one solution - somehow using Cantabile WITHIN your DAW - and now you are disappointed that this doesn’t work. I don’t really get this disappointment - nobody ever claimed that this was possible.
But since you said that you want to use Cantabile’s performing features within your DAW, why not explore the options we offered you:
-
connect a virtual MIDI port (like Loopmidi) from your DAW to Cantabile; use the Background Rack in Cantabile to connect this virtual MIDI input port to “Loopback - Main Keyboard”. Now use the virtual MIDI output port in your DAW to send MIDI data to Cantabile. Now you can play Cantabile like an external synth in your DAW. And of course you can record, edit, slice and dice the MIDI data in your DAW like you would for a plugin or external synthesizer played from your DAW
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to get audio data from Cantabile back to your DAW, you need to route Cantabile’s output through a virtual audio cable, as @terrybritton illustrated above - now you get audio data from Cantabile that you can record in your DAW and then process it with plugins, mix it, etc.
-
the only challenge in this setup is managing your audio connections - not sure if you need to use ASIO4ALL or Voicemeeter to combine your audio streams - otherwise Cantabile and Cubase will fight for the audio driver. @terrybritton is really the resident Voicemeeter expert - I’m sure he can construct a setup that lets you manage Cantabile AND Cubase with the same audio interface.
Cheers,
Torsten
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Hmmmm - interesting challenge! I’ll bet Voicemeeter Pro “Banana” could solve all of the audio routing problems by making it the main Virtual ASIO device for Cubase and setting Cantabile to use Voicemeeter’s INSERTS engine to talk to Voicemeeter on its many available channels. (16 virtual ASIO MONO channels in Voicemeeter!)
I’ll have to play with that a bit to see if they can be run together that way. (If so, I feel another video coming soon!)
Terry
To add to what @Torsten said, if you really want Cantabile to run “in” Cubase, you could run an instance of Bidule inside Cubase, and have Bidule send audio and MIDI to/from Cantabile.
Cantabile was never designed to run in Cubase, in the same way Pro Tools, Logic, or Microsoft Word were never designed to run inside Cubase, and Cubase was never designed to host other applications like that either.
So unless you tell us firstly what you’re trying to achieve with Cantabile and Cubase, and secondly why it’s so important that Cantabile runs inside Cubase, there’s not much else we can help you with.
Neil
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There has been talk in the past about Rewire support in Cantabile (which I assume would allow it to do what we’re talking about there)…
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My old post, which @FredProgGH linked to above, set out a fairly comprehensive reason for wishing to run Cantabile inside another host, either through ReWire or as a plugin.
It can’t be overemphasized how different the thinking is between running plugins in your recording DAW as opposed to Cantabile. The thinking, the outcome, the accessibility, the whole left/right brain thing… Cantabile was designed to PLAY. DAWs are designed to RECORD.
That’s why we have chosen not to use DAWs live, although most of us will have tried it at some point.
The only way it can really happen at this time is, as Terry and others have pointed out, by using software which allows Cantabile to plumb into the DAW via software hooks, or to use a dedicated second computer as if it were an external module. I’m doing that right now. It’s the lowest latency solution I can find. It allows me access to those setups which work so beautifully in Cantabile’s world and which I would like to record just as they are, without having to sweat it out using DAW architecture.
I would totally support the development of C3 as a VST plugin - and I believe it would vastly open the market up for Brad as well.
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I totally agree with Ade.
I appreciate the replies I got so far but it looks like some people here are not really aware of what a DAW really is and what it is capable of doing.
In my second post I clearly described what I intend to do with Cantabile insinde my DAW.
Still people continue to ask what I´m trying to achieve with Cantabile in Cubase, this is really strange…
Thanks for the workaround with the external software but this isn´t working for me. I find it really complex and time consuming to get a connection this way.
I would as well support development of Cantabile as a VST plugin in the future.
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Just to set the record straight: I’ve been working with DAWs since the days of good old Steinberg Twenty-Four and then Cubit (which became Cubase) - so I’ve been around the block for a while. And @Neil_Durant and @terrybritton are two of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to computers and audio, so careful when suggesting people don’t know what they are talking about here - especially when these people are trying to help you.
And our questions around what it is you are trying to do stem from the very inconcrete way you state your requirements:
I would like to use Cantabiles performing features as well as its morphing tools within my DAW, how can I do that?
If you were a little more specific, we might actually be able to help - do you want to use Cantabile as an instrument (to play, record and process the sounds you create in Cantabile in your DAW) or do you want to use Cantabile as an effects rack within your DAW to process audio signals within your DAW? Or do you want to use recordings from Cantabile in your DAW?
Each of these scenarios has potential solutions - none of them plug&play, unfortunately, since Cantabile wasn’t built to “fit inside” a DAW - a little creativity and persistence is necessary. And there is a lot of competence in this forum among the people offering to help you - provided you don’t insult them …
I use Cantabile quite happily with (not within) Cubase: when I want to use the sounds I’ve created in Cantabile for my live setup within a recording, I follow exactly the approach outlined above - I connect Cubase to Cantabile via a virtual midi cable and record Cantabile’s output in Cubase (via the mixing desk function of my RME Fireface, which allows loopback connections, feeding output from one software into another - but you could also do this via the virtual audio cable approach @terrybritton illustrated). So it does work - and it’s not really painful once you understand the ins and outs of it.
Cheers,
Torsten
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BTW: the simplest way to work with Cantabile and Cubase is one I use sometimes (when I’ve got my complete live kit set up in the studio): I run Cantabile on my live laptop and Cubase on my studio PC. I connect both the “traditional” way with MIDI cables (well, not quite: I use a USB connection via iConnect MIDI) from my Studio PC to the laptop, feeding the audio output from the laptop’s audio interface into my digital mixing desk, which in turn feeds Cubase. Again, just like in the good old days of hooking your DX7 up to your studio environment, just better 
This way, I have my trusted “right-brain” live environment as I know and trust it on one side and the systematic “left-brain” studio environment on the other side, with each of them playing to their respective strengths.
Cheers,
Torsten
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I’ll admit, that remark did make me laugh out loud, so thanks for that! 
No hard feelings - you’re new here. This particular forum has wall-to-wall pros frequenting the place, so you can set your worst fears to rest! 
Terry
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Hi Torsten,
I don’t think any offense was intended by the original poster.
If you take a look at Metaplugin, you see that it is a mutli-input /output plugin that could basically do, in the ugliest imaginable way, 99% of what we do in Cantabile.
And this is the point; that all of this software can achieve pretty much what any other package can do, but in the worst cases, you’d have to jump through crazy hoops to get there. Cantabile is our elegant solution.
Cantabile is a beautiful live host. It is not a DAW. And no DAW I’ve worked with would provide the comfort factor that Cantabile does.
But I very often want to bring into my DAW world the setups that are so inspiring in Cantabile.
So, Cantabile is not designed to be a plugin? Sure. But consider this:
A Metaplugin would be full of cables with PIZMidi all over the place to simulate the filters and splitters etc - and it would be possible, in theory, to get a transportable plugin which could be inserted into any VST /AU DAW and allow the precise setup of plugins to be recalled across any platform, from ProTools to Cubase to Sonar. And it would be ugly.
What would a Cantabile plugin look like?
I think it’s reasonably easy to visualize.
- It has a clutch of midi and audio i/o - just as Metaplugin does. That would be config’d from a drop down in the same way as any significant plugin, such as Kontakt, would do.
- It would grant access to all the plugins in the computer, precisely as any host would do - and as Metaplugin currently does. (I mention this only to remind us that this is technically doable.)
- It would be Cantabile inside a DAW.
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Hey Adrian,
not sure if any offense was intended, but at the very least I consider it rude to suggest that people trying to help don’t know what they are talking about, just because the solution they are suggesting is not the one that one wants. But that’s a matter of style - and de gustibus non est disputandum
I am not disputing that a Cantabile plugin could be useful - in fact, a plugin version (fully compatible to the stand-alone-program) of Cantabile would be ideal for some usage scenarios - I’d love to simply plug my favorite Cantabile setups into some of my Cubase (or Studio One or Mixbus) projects.
What I was doing (together withi @Neil_Durant and @terrybritton) was trying to help the original poster (@enCiphered) around the fact that Cantabile in its current form just is NOT a plugin and will not work WITHIN Cubase - suggesting a way to make the two programs work together, provided the OP could state a more specific usage scenario and would be willing to deal with some “wire and sellotape” complications to get them to work together.
The fact that Cantabile in its current form is not a plugin is a conscious design decision made by @brad, based on a certain product idea: a host program to use VST plugins live - and to me, it is the best available product for this purpose!
Based on this underlying product concept, having Cantabile available as a plugin for DAWs doesn’t look like a priority to me - there are a number of “meta-plugins” available on the market already - Plogue Bidule, or simpler approaches like Waves MultiRack or NomadFactoryMAGMA come to mind. In this, I don’t agree with you, @Ade - I don’t believe offering Cantabile as a plugin would significantly expand its market. The plugin market is already flooded; another “meta-plugin” wouldn’t make a significant difference. We love Cantabile because it is just a great live VST host - and we want to use it within our DAWs as an extension of this.
But I very much agree - to make Cantabile the ultimate live VST host, it could be easier to integrate Cantabile and a DAW - and Rewire would be a huge step towards this from a usability point of view. Just offer rewire ports as MIDI and audio input and output ports in Cantabile, then threading the two programs together would be a piece of cake!
Cheers,
Torsten
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It was never my intention to offend or insult anyone, my apoIogies. And I´ve never sad that you or anyone else here doesn´t know what he is talking about, you should really read my posts very carefully.
I don’t agree with you, @Ade - I don’t believe offering Cantabile as a plugin would significantly expand its market. The plugin market is already flooded; another “meta-plugin” wouldn’t make a significant difference. We love Cantabile because it is just a great live VST host - and we want to use it within our DAWs as an extension of this.
This is because you have a very rerstrictive view of what could be achieved with a tool like Cantabile as a plugin within a host. Maybe you would understand what I mean if you were a producer, someone who is working every day in a studio and is not only dealing with live performance.
However, I accept that Cantabile was designed to be a standalone software for musicians and a real-time performing tool. But you are absolutely wrong when you say that it wouldn´t make a significant difference if there was a plugin version as well.
Maybe this is a cultural thing - but this again reads pretty rude and insulting. At the very least, you are assuming things about me (that I am not dealing with DAWs on a daily basis, etc. etc.).
Plus, have you considered that someone might simply have a different opinion (and a good reason to have it) and RESPECT that opinion (that’s what a constructive debate is about) instead of saying “you just don’t understand what I mean because you don’t have my experience”.
OK, I’m out of this discussion…
Cheers,
Torsten
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I agree with @Torsten, the tone does come across as very disrespectful, towards people who were only taking their time to help you by responding to your question and finding a usable solution for what you need.
Torsten does not have a “very rerstrictive view of what could be achieved”. If you read back over past forum posts, you’d realise he’s incredibly knowledgeable and super helpful, and his views are always carefully considered and based on his considerable experience across many audio and music technologies. I’m certain the rest of the forum community here would agree 100%.
Actually Torsten’s carefully measured point was about the industry demand and priority for a pluggable solution, not the usefulness. He clearly said it would be very useful and powerful.
For what it’s worth, there was a thread on the forum 2 years about running Cantabile in another VST host:
If you disagree with him or anyone else on here, feel free to explain why. We can all learn something. But please do not criticise, judge, or be rude towards people just because of a differing opinion.
Neil
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Ouch - talk about pouring fuel onto the fire. 
Shame - because I think this is a worthwhile discussion (as I did several moons ago).
@Torsten - I’m not sure the market is saturated with product as elegant as Cantabile. That’s why it’s our live host of choice.
And although no one can predict the future of any product, I’m confident that Cantabile as a plugin would, at the very least, not shrink its appeal.
The thinking that makes Cantabile a great candidate for Rewire support is equally applied to full integration - with the added benefits that brings.
Maybe not next week, next month - or next year, but it certainly will remain on my wishlist for the reasons I’ve set out previously.
Cantabile encourages the player to pursue combinations and setups which enhance creativity - and for a composer, it’s an extremely seductive proposition.
Far more so than, say VEP.
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Great, if you mean it. But this reads hollow because of what follows it in the post, you just slight him again instead.
No, you just unmistakably implied it.
Now you know what someone thinks, without really knowing so you must be much more that just a producer who works in a studio every day.
All I can add is that you may as well dispense with any apologies if they are followed by a ‘parting shot’. These folks were trying to give the best advice they have and that’s all they do and have done. I apologize if I offended you by criticizing or slighting you too … and I mean it!
Just my 2 cents,
Dave
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I enjoy the many discussions on this forum. This is where I come to find help or make new discoveries. EVERYONE here has been very helpful, and tolerant with my many newbie questions. I still ask stupid questions, yet someone always tries to help. Torsten has always bent over backwards to help anyone here, even though he didn’t have to. I, in turn, try to help others, even though I am lousy at it. I try to return what I have received. I sincerely consider everyone here to be my friends, because who else, anywhere, is going to help us in this crazy music world we have chosen. I respect everyone here, and respect their opinions. I feel they respect my goofy, dumb ass as well. I am here for the comradery and I get that nowhere else on any forum. Many thanks to all those who responded to my pleas for help…you guys NEVER get the kudos you deserve, but I remember and I have loads of respect for you. Just my 1,000,000 cents.
Many Regards
Corky
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Hmmmm: Cantabile as a VST?! So I could have a couple of Cantabiles running inside Cantabile? Now that would be very fun! Lots of possibilities!
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