OK, did some testing with this - looks very good! It seems that during the setup of a song, Cantabile will will actively refresh the bound plugin parameters, so re-sending bound values isn’t necessary.
I created a binding from Smoothie’s output value to the rack’s MIDI output, and it did send the correct MIDI output value at the start of the song without any change to the input parameter, so that’s good - no unpredictable starting of songs…
Actually, Cantabile seems to refresh the current value of the output a couple of times on loading - I’m getting six MIDI messages with the same value when loading a song (without any Song-OnLoad initialization binding). Doesn’t hurt for this use case, but may be interesting for @brad…
I used Cantabile’s binding mechanism of converting the output value to MIDI instead of using Smoothie’s built-in MIDI output, in order to be sure that Cantabile would actually read and output the current Smoothie output value without the input parameter changing. I guess Smoothie wouldn’t output any MIDI if the input doesn’t change, so using Cantabile bindings seems to be the better choice to make sure initialization of my song works.
Here is the latest version of my Smoothie rack for anyone who’d like to try it: Smoothie 1.zip (3.3 KB)
I guess Smoothie wouldn’t output any MIDI if the input doesn’t change
Correct – VST3 plugins only receive parameter change info from the host, so SmoothieVST can’t initiate any CC outputs until a parameter actually changes. (It doesn’t have any visibility into song or rack states/loads, etc., which are the province of the host.)
I wonder how much it would take to convince @brad to build Smoothie-like behaviour into Cantabile, so a plugin wasn’t needed. So values modified by state changes, such as faders, can have a rate of change parameter. I wonder if this would fit cleanly into Cantabile’s architecture?
Yes - one of the highest priorities on my Cantabile wishlist - @brad has hinted that the new bindings architecture may enable something like this in the future…
I nearly mentioned something about this in one of my previous replies here, but decided not to because I didn’t want to prematurely get people’s hopes up. It’s definitely high on my list and might tackle it after this next batch of smaller changes.
The discussion here has inspired me to share some of my other creations with the community. Maybe some of these are also worthy of feature addition consideration if they prove popular.
