I found a possible bug in the “All sounds off” (ASO) in Cantabile 4 Build 4220 on Windows 10 Pro 20H2.
I had a very sweaty 5 minutes at the beginning of my show last Sunday at Tuska Metal Festival as my notes just kept on playing even though I was smashing the “All sounds off” (ASO) button in Cantabile 4. Eventually I had to restart C4 which takes a few minutes to load with all the VST instruments and my pre-loaded setlist, so it’s safe to say that the first song of our show wasn’t the proudest moment of my career.
Yesterday, I recreated the issue, and it turned out be mostly a user error, but at the same time C4 did not work as expected.
The main issue was using wrong preset in my Kurzweil PC3 that I’m using as midi controller with excellent internal sounds as a backup. Due to the wrong preset, my 2nd footswitch that is supposed to send CC54 routed to “Song - Next state” in the background rack of C4 was instead sending CC66 which is sostenuto. So, when I was playing the last chord of the intro section before moving into verse, I stepped on the 2nd footswitch to change into the next state but accidentally used sostenuto to grab the last chord of the intro that I was still playing with my left hand. To make things even worse, the 2nd pedal (Boss FS-6) was set to function as a momentary switch that did not work well with sostenuto. End result - no matter what I did with the tools provided by C4, I could not release the notes held with sostenuto! Even after restarting the C4 engine, the notes were still playing.
So, I figured out my mysterious problem and solved it by editing my background rack and mapped CC66 to CC54, so that the problem should not be possible in the future. I’m also planning to edit my backup rack so that ASO sends CC161 to my Kurzweil which should trigger its built-in panic button that would have helped during the show. However, I panicked too much during the show and forgot to try that option…
However, one question remains:
Should ASO release also the notes that are held with sostenuto? In my case, ASO did not release them. However, when I went one step further and opened the affected VSTi (IK multimedia Sampletron 2) and pressed its built-in panic button sending all-notes off, all the notes were released correctly. To me, this indicates that similar behavior should be possible with ASO in C4.
What do you think?
Additional info that might be relevant:
I’m running two instances of C4 at the same time. The primary C4 has all the VSTi and song files etc. The secondary C4 instance (null audio) is used just as a midi router that allows me to use practically any midi keyboard and do the necessary bindings without touching the primary C4 instance. These two C4 instances are connected via loopMidi software that is used to create virtual loopback MIDI-ports to interconnect applications on Windows. This configuration causes some additional latency but the flexibility of this system is more important to me. However, I don’t think this makes any difference to the aforementioned problem, although it definitely complicates the midi routing.