Plugin state behaviour? (Pianoteq)

Hi, I’d like to have Cantabile pass through the preset name through to Pianoteq, but not the other parameters. In particular, I’d like to be able to “freeze” the “Stereo/Mono” output mode within Pianoteq so that this keeps the setting across songs within the setlist.

Within Pianoteq I have checked the “output” box on the “Freeze parameters” section. This means that the Mono/Stereo mode will not change between presets. This works fine within Pianoteq itself.

I have ignored racks for this test. Within Cantabile I start from a new song, and no routing. I add the Pianoteq plugin and untick all plugin state behaviour checkboxes except for “Selected Program”

If I then switch between 2 PianoTeq presets within Cantabile (eg Daily Practice and Pop), the Stereo/Mono setting seems to be sent across to Pianoteq, and is not frozen.

Am I missing something, or is there an alternative way of doing this?

The reason for wanting to do this, is that I use Stereo at home, but sometimes Mono when at other locations, I also have different reverb settings within Pianoteq. I don’t know these settings in advance, and so I don’t want to have to create duplicate rack states for my “Piano” rack with Stereo and Mono settings. If this setting is frozen within the plugin I can then change it once at the start of a session and it will apply to all songs.

I also don’t want to sum a stereo output to mono afterwards, or take just 1 channel because this creates other problems.

Thanks!

Anyone any ideas on how to not affect the plugin mono/stereo setting between presets or rack states?

Just had a quick look at this and this seems to be a quirk or Pianoteq. When loading a preset via it’s internal preset management it honours the frozen parameters but when selecting a preset exported via the VST API it doesn’t.

This is a question for Pianoteq whether this is by design or a bug.

Brad, thanks for looking into it. I have asked the question on the PTQ forum.

As a workaround, I am using a button on my piano to send a MIDI message via Bome into Cantabile which is then “bound” to the output mode setting on PianoTeq. I have to delay this message by 500ms as otherwise I can get race conditions between any preset change, and the output mode change.

This way I can just have a single rack state for “grand piano” and then use individual assignable buttons to change settings for stereo/mono or reverb settings.

Are there any other ways of doing this?

Obviously the best solution would be if the preset swap could handle this. But here’s some other things to try (if you’re running Performer)

Firstly you could create Cantabile states for each preset/mode and use the state behaviour for that parameter:

With this parameter enabled, each state will explicitly set that parameter when the state is selected (according to how it was when the state was saved).

Another possibility would be to use a state load binding:

Brad