I am an avid user of Cantabile’s recorder, and assign each VST instrument to its own “unassigned” port in order to bring it into the recorder. I have a template with 13 items in it going into the recorder - eight VST’s (six instruments and a master out and a master reverb out), 3 hardware synths, my microphone and the metronome click track. I use the Musical tempo (absolute) format for recording. (I also grab all the MIDI info, but that is not the issue.)
The audio tracks are recorded into a WAV or BWF file depending on the file size (Cantabile automatically picks the file format), and I wind up with 12 stereo tracks and one mono track that appear in the multi-track file in the order they appear in the RECORDINGS list, so dedicated instrument inputs come first, followed by my “unlisted” tracks in alpha-numerical order. (Thus, the stereo mix output does not sit at the top of the list, so it won’t go out of the first track’s port - only the top selected recorded instrument would - an audio input to my audio interface - in my case a hardware synth or ADAT loopback port, as the ports of each type appear alphabetically.)
To mix the recording later, I have to bring the file into Audacity, which sees them all as mono tracks, then combine the appropriate ones into stereo tracks, leaving the metronome and mic as mono tracks.
Well, that is all well and good for doing my mixing in the DAW, as I have all my stems ready to go, and this takes little time to do.
HOWEVER:
When I have this fantastic multi-track recording, I CAN bring it into Cantabile’s media player and playback all the tracks to hear a raw mix by assigning the tracks to output channels. I can even do some direct mixing of each track’s volume, or - as in the case of the metronome track - choose to not output it at all.
The problem lies with the fact that the “default” port assignment, whenever you add a track to the media player, is locked in at giving you a single left and right stereo-out track and a MIDI out track. That default and having no way to override it is the issue.
I have to go in and manually assign all these port assignments for every multi-track file that I want to add to the media player to replace the default - a VERY TEDIOUS thing to do. There is no way of saving and loading in sets of port assignments, or even of duplicating a media player entry so you can change its name and file assignment leaving everything else the same. This default port setting for the media player items seems to be burned into a DLL, as I could find no JSON or INI entry related to this.
Can we have some way of loading in port assignment setups or a utility to duplicate an existing entry at least? It would make it sooooo much nicer when using Cantabile as a multitrack recorder to just be able to plop it into the media player to audition the recording quickly and tell in a flash if the recording came out well - or have these recordings available for quick inclusion in a set to play on top of sometimes.
I think such a feature inclusion will make the media player much more user-friendly for taking tracks recorded in Cantabile and making them instantly reusable on a gig.
Terry
