Splitting up a backing track and gapless playback

Cantabile
1

Hello there!

I am a guitar centric musician who plays limited synth parts live as a solo act, which makes me a bit of an outlier around these parts it seems. I recently discovered Cantabile, and I was immediately intrigued.

I’ve read the manual, and have been lurking for a few days to get a grip of the workflow. It’s great stuff! My first attempt at creating a song was not as smooth as I would hope, however.

Since I have no backing band, backing tracks are a must for me right now. My initial thought process and attempt to tackle this was to split my recorded song (minus my guitar and synth parts) into chunks of loopable material.

I then fed these into a playlist in the Media Player in Cantabile, using my MIDI controller to trigger states. Each state would point to the correct “chunk” of my backing track in the Media Player playlist, along with my needed guitar effects / synths in racks for that particular part. My chunk of audio would loop using the option in the Timeline until I chose to move to the next part of the song.

I then used Ade’s excellent method of Autoplaying the Media Player on State Load found here: http://community.cantabilesoftware.com/t/four-bindings-which-achieve-autoplay

This worked, however, there was a nasty gap in playback. It wasn’t much, only a ms or two, but enough to ruin the effect.

I also tried playing with Ranges in my media file, but to no avail.

My long winded question: is there any way to “queue” the playlist to achieve seamless play when switching states? Right now I have it working quite well feeding the entire backing track into the Media Player and using States to adjust my sounds. This allows me zero flexibility, though. If I wanted to talk to the crowd, or push my sweet guitar solo another few measures, I would need to build this extra time into the backing track.

My long winded view of a perfect Cantabile: right now there is tons of MIDI support, but I would love to see more functionality that feeds on the metronome. I would love to see some sort of binding that would allow a state change at the end of the next measure, similar to how most looper pedals work (the Boomerang, for example). Once I have punched in my BPM and time signature, I could tap a button to switch to the next state, but Cantabile delays this change until the last beat.

I haven’t played with the recorder, but if I could also use that to layer my guitar parts on the fly while performing, that would be just a perfect, happy world.

1 Like
2

Hi there!
Have a check of this:

I think that development in this area is going to provide at least some solutions to your particular questions.
In the meantime, I think that there may be an answer in a synchronous midi file that runs alongside the audio file, and which can be bound to Cantabile’s functions.
I tried running a seamless transition between states and, as you’ve said, there’s a gap.

You might want to check some of the looping plugins which are available. Certainly would allow you to add guitar parts in on the fly.

3

Hi @Hydriplex

Welcome to the Cantabile and forum.

What you’re describing currently falls slightly outside what Cantabile can do, but is definitely something that will be addressed in upcoming versions. Besides the link provided by @Ade above, I think you’re also referring to some of the functionality described here by Live Loop Control - which is basically the ability to control looping and transport jumping in realtime.

Main reason this hasn’t been implemented yet? It’s a complicated area and I’m still gathering requirements and ideas together. (I’ve learned not to rush into a new feature just cause it seems cool).

Brad