I have a SWAM rack of about 20 instruments all on the same MIDI channel. I use program changes for bindings that enable the wanted instrument.
2 Likes
FWIW I now have SWAM Saxes playing nice in Cantabile. Itās probably been 9 months or so since I got it to be stable. Canāt say I did anything different than you normally would, the Preset Model I use is Entire Plugin Snapshot, and Entire Bank is checked for both Rack states. And I only use Rack states, I donāt use SWAMās presets.
FWIW I just did a Win 10 update, had a weird error message āPreset Version not compatible with this software versionā, which later turned out to be due to SWAM. Brad confirmed was not a Cantabile message, but Windows. I merely updated SWAM with their Software Center updater, problem fixed.
Granted, thatās the only SWAM I run, and I only run 1 instrument in a song (but one song has Rack State changes for a different Tenor Sax in different song sections.
So if youāre on Win 10, you might want to try the latest updates. Just back up first! 
Tom
3 Likes
Does restoring a SWAM instrument backup work? I bought some for Win10 during the Black Friday sale but maybe I shouldnāt have because itās not going to be supported any more.
Itās still on the website as a compatible version of Windows but they donāt plan to keep it working if Microsoft changes the SDK in a way that breaks it. Theyāre only supporting Windows 11 properly, from now on, and I have no intention to ever use that.
What worries me is the software center and the license authentication process. Each time I start a SWAM instrument as a standalone, on Win 10, it says itās checking the license. I worry that at some point, the software that does that will fail, and the update process will break what we have.
I was told that once itās working to my satisfaction I just shouldnāt update it (by their support) which Iām fine with, but the software center seems to force us to update it to get the license accepted.
I also bought some ios/iPadOs versions, which have some feature restriction but are much better value for money, for me. They work pretty well on my iPad Mini 4, which is quite old and not all that fast, and on an iPad Pro 10.5" from 2017 I bought recently.
They can work in a DAW, like audio modelingās own Camelot, but so far Iāve just used them standalone. AFAIK, thereās no license validation once theyāre installed, so there shouldnāt be any problem with just never updating them - the only remaining worry is that one day they might get removed from the App Store, like some of the older apps Iāve bought.
I havenāt read the whole page yet, but before I lose my place; if you export a MIDI mapping, from the menus inside the standalone SWAM instrument (which is the form Iām the most familiar with using), you can then import it again to any other instrument in the same family, e.g all saxophones can use the same one.
I also found it tended to work well enough for similar families, e.g. i import saxophone ones for a flute, and so on. There may be a couple of parameters that arenāt in common between different groups of woodwind, or different groups of brass instruments, but the ones that overlap get imported properly and work.
Inside the menus of the instrument, thereās a MIDI Templates tab (if I remember the name correctly), which lets you see templates imported or that are part of other instruments. You can choose one to apply it. I often find the Save button isnāt enabled, after doing that, but Save As or Edit still work.
Either way, after applying a new MIDI mapping (aka template), you can then use the standalone instrumentās own menu to Save As or Edit the current preset and select the box for MIDI Mapping, so it gets saved with that preset. I donāt know how well this works inside Cantabile, because all Iāve done with that so far is verify that it seems to be possible to use it.
MIDI mappings and instrument presets are just xml - human readable, and you can generally figure out how to make some changes in them with a text editor.
I donāt use standalone mode and I donāt get an obvious license check and definitely no forced update. It may be doing an offline license check in the background, of course.
I havenāt looked into doing a backup within SWAM, not a bad idea.
I would be extremely disappointed if it bricks at some point on Win 10. SWAM is rather expensive and I only got it about a year ago.
BTW you can get free Win 10 Extended Service Updates from Microsoft till October. Like you Iām not eager to move to 11, DAW and Cantabile performance results seem mixed. Iāll probably just use Bitdefender for those rare occasions when I go online for plugin updates.
Tom
1 Like
Using the Export and Import menus for MIDI mappings, within SWAM instruments seems to be the best way of doing it (rather than the MIDI Templates tab) and then you can also have the mappings files saved somewhere you can get at more easily.
The license validation process is a bit mysterious and doesnāt seem to be explained anywhere. I was going through the free trial of all solo instruments, recently, so maybe itās not the same once an instrument is bought and in use. It worries me though. I asked basically the same question a few different ways and never really got an answer that was definite enough for me to want to keep buying Windows plugins, in the circumstances. Also, if the policy is to only support one version of Windows properly, the same will presumably happen with Windows 11, in a few years, possibly less. Iām not really confident about buying any more, as things stand, but I may well buy more iPad versions if thereās another sale.
I was happier with Windows 7 once the updates stopped getting in the way of me using it so I kind of welcome the end of support for Windows 10. Iāve always felt the idea that we must have the latest security updates to be safe was a confidence trick, to keep us on the Microsoft hook. Windows is never secure, which is why there are always more security updates. I think relying on Microsoft to protect us from the wild internet is a bad idea, and at best would only work until they made a mistake, or someone outwitted them. It seems to me itās best to assume nothingās safe, and try to take what precautions we can. Their updates can be part of that but they tend to break things too, in my experience, and their policy of forcing them at inopportune moments makes it harder to get good use out of a computer.
I recently exchanged some messages with Simone and Emanuele from Audiomodeling, via support tickets. Simone said that it doesnāt validate while offline but does when online. I didnāt press him on the details but I assume that means after initial validation. Possibly it never needs to validate again if it stays offline. Iāve recently noticed a small balloon text style pop up in Windows 10 saying itās checking validation. Maybe it does that every time it sees an internet connection but isnāt always noticeable.
So, our best hope for Windows 10 is that we can keep it working so long as itās on a machine thatās never online. My worry is that the validation process will change again and it then wonāt work on Windows 10 because updates to the software wonāt work, after a while. If so, I guess that could also apply to MacOS but so far support goes back as far as High Sierra (10.3) and if they changed it to require an update to the software that would presumably mean it would only work on recent releases of MacOS tooā¦ and iPadOS.
I gather Emanuele is more the authority on this. I said Iād like to quote him here if he had no objection and I didnāt receive any, so Iāll put that in a separate post.
The gist of it, regarding Windows was that Microsoft have made it very difficult to support changes to software to work in Windows 10 and further changes to SWAM for Windows will only be written for Windows 11, with a good chance of not working on Windows 10. I donāt know when official End Of Life of Windows 11 will be, but I expect the same will apply with the next version, which might not be all that far away since Windows 11 isnāt exactly popular and has been out for quite a while already.
I think this part was from Simone, but it was an unsigned reply so Iām not sure:
"Regarding the Windows authorization issue it was an extraordinary issue that shouldnāt mine your trust in the system, I am sorry that was the main reason to switch to iOS. In more than 10 years we had only a couple of issues solved in a few hours. That is unfortunately the price to pay for web development maintenance on several components that sometimes needs to be refactor or updated.
On windows Itās not a mystery: if you are online it double checks if you have a valid licence. If you are offline (but previosly authorized) it allows you to continue working. "
The authorisation issue I was talking about was about the problems I had with the update they asked us to install for the change in how authorisation was handled. That didnāt work for me without uninstalling all of it and starting again, but it wasnāt something that broke support for Windows 10. It did make me think that could be what it looks like when it can no longer be installed on Windows 10 though - a similar update might be required to activate online from then on, but the update wonāt install on Windows 10 because new software updates will only be for Windows 11, or whichever new version of Windows is current at the time, once Win 11 reaches EOL too.
So far, this doesnāt seem to have been the case with MacOS, so Iām getting an old iMac to try this out - hopefully regressing it to one of the older versions that are still supported (e.g. High Sierra or Mojave), as part of the experiment. Simone said that our āDesktopā licenses can be used on either MacOS or Windows. We get four activations but can ask to deactivate one if we need to move it to another machine.
Here is part of a reply from Emanuele on the Windows 10 support subject, from mid December, during a discussion I had about that activation/update problem:
"
Emanuele Parravicini
3 hours ago
Hi Andy,
thanks for reaching out.
Of course, all your SWAM products will continue to work on Windows 10 for a while. Just be aware that we will not support Windows 10 forever, since Microsoft declared it End Of Life.
If in future we will need any features that are not supported by Windows 10, we will inform our customers, and they will not be able to update their products anymore, unless upgrading Windows.
"
Here is the most recent reply from Emanuele on the subject of working on Windows 10. Weāve discussed this before but I think this mostly covers it. It starts with a bit about supported Mac hardware which I wasnāt clear about:
"
Hi Andy,
ā[MacOS support: 10.13 onwards] Since there are no specific models listed on our website, that means that any model capable of running the Operating System mentioned are supported.
Intel Core i5, i7, Silicon M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, they are all supported.
We are third party developers, we cannot know how long Apple will run a given Operating System on a given architecture. Also, we cannot know when Apple will deprecate the support of given Operating Systems in the development frameworks we use. We play by ear, as any other developer.
[Windows 10] As for Windows 10, we will support it until we will run in some framework upgrade that will force us to be compatible with Windows 11 and above. Unfortunately, since Microsoft has stopped the support for Windows 10, we cannot - of course - update the Operating System on behalf of Microsoft.
ā¦
Best Regards,
Emanuele
"