Limits of number of songs

Cantabile
1

I see an ad here in the UK for Bandeoke band members. I am a little tempted to check them out, but it does make me curious what the limits are on songs in a setlist (they have ~250 songs!)?

  1. Does Cantabile itself have limits?
  2. Memory: I use racks, so I’d assume memory would generally hit a reasonable top end as most are shared across songs.
  3. Load time: I can imagine this would be potentially long if preload enabled. But as racks are shared it wouldn’t be linear with number of songs.
  4. Stability - one plugin can bring the whole thing down, followed by a long-reload. I’d assume I’d always have to have the backup PC going.
  5. We have F3 for search - would be essential :slight_smile:
  6. Probably worth having some generic piano+organ+strings+brass songs.
  7. Avoid preload?
  8. Anything else I’ve not thought of?

John

2

Hi John,

  1. I don’t believe there is a technical limit in terms of songs per setlist per se - @brad will need to pitch in here if there is actually one that I’ve not come across yet. My current repertoire set list (I preload the complete repertoire and then select songs for the actual gig via MIDI from LivePrompter, so my setlists tend to get BIG) is 150 songs

  2. My repertoire setlist clocks in at 12.3 GB memory usage with 309 loaded racks. No problem so far with 32 GB of RAM. But I’m definitely optimizing for CPU and RAM usage, and I’ve weeded out the problematic plugins - especially around the sample-based VSTs, you need to know the good and the bad ones…

  3. My complete setlist loads in less than a minute. Since I stick to my proven core of racks, with very few additions, adding new songs hardly adds anything to the preload time. I also spend time with my setup on a regular basis to reduce the number of racks (use the “Verify Setlist” features to identify racks that can be replaced) and weed out “legacy” stuff.

  4. Stability is an issue - I drive my rig hard during practice and rehearsals. If there are “shaky” songs, I try to drill down to the dodgy plugin and replace it. I still have one song in my list that does crash in specific situations - but after I have loaded it once, it doesn’t give any trouble afterwards. Still haven’t sussed out the exact reason; will probably try to rebuild it from scratch when I find the time, but for the time being I make sure I load it immediately after starting Cantabile, and all is fine… Given our typical gig situation, we could live with the time for a Cantabile re-start, but if I had to be absolutely fault-resistant in a professional gig situation, I’d probably set up a hot standby rig… But that won’t help with dodgy plugins - you need to weed these out beforehand.

  5. I drive Cantabile remote via MIDI from LivePrompter, so I tend to use LivePrompter’s search feature to quickly find a song and automatically load the corresponding Cantabile song file. With a repertoire of 250 songs, you might want to look at LivePrompter or something similar as well?

  6. I have three basic “rehearsal” setups, that cover a lot of terrain:

    • a piano type sound on the lower 88 keys (grand piano, rhodes, wurly)
    • four different sounds for the upper keyboard at the touch of a button (Rock Organ, Blues Organ, Brass, Sax)
    • a string and an organ layer that I can fade in on top of the piano sound

  7. I wouldn’t avoid preload - in a setup like that you need snappy switching times

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Torsten

2 Likes
3

Thanks Torsten, looks like we’re largely aligned. I also mercilessly remove badly-behaved plugins. I’m aware of LivePrompter, but I’ve focused on a heavily customised web interface for my needs.

4

There’s no hard coded limit on the size of a set list - the biggest limiting factor will be available memory is using pre-loaded set list (but even that can be mitigated by excluding some songs from the preload if necessary).

As for memory usage, using shared racks to limit the number of instances of plugins is the most effective way to reduce memory (aside from using fewer plugins).

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