I have a setlist with about 20 songs.
Some take very little time to load (about 2 seconds) because I only use one VST, but others take a long time (about 15 seconds) because they have more VSTs, media players, etc.
I know there’s an option in Cantabile that “loads all the songs in a setlist into RAM,” but that’s a bit crazy, since it uses a lot of RAM.
I’d be interested to know if it’s possible to preload only the next song after the current one, and so on, so that switching between the current song and the next is instantaneous.
At the top of the set list column is a small title bar showing the name of the current set list. Click and a pop up menu appears. Select pre load. Now when you open your set list all songs in the set load, not just the currently selected song. I regularly load sets with 45+ songs, each song using 2 to 15 VST’s. A large set may take 60-90 seconds to load, but once loaded switching between songs is almost instantaneous.
Not really crazy - once you get used to working with shared racks and optimize your setup, RAM usage is manageable. My 150 song setlist uses about 8 GB of RAM…
Think this through - when should Cantabile then load the third song? While playing the second song?
Pre-loading a song is always a disruption risk; extensive disk and RAM access can block audio processing, so there is always the risk of that loading process getting in the way of playing. i wouldn’t want any potentially disruptive processes going on in the background while I am playing a song.
Really, using shared racks and preloading the whole setlist is the only realistic way of avoiding this.
You can also use the “Exclude from preload” feature on individual songs to select which songs are preloaded. My typical workflow is: Shift-click to select all the songs on the setlist, right-click to checkmark “Exclude from preload”, then go back and individually uncheck the songs i do want to preload.
Everything you’ve told me is interesting!
The problem is that I don’t use shared racks. I’m going to start doing so once the summer concert season is over and optimize the loads by preloading everything from the start.
I don’t use shared racks either, and I have no problem preloading 35-40 songs for our sets with 3 or 4 VSTs each. Someday I might reconfigure everything to use shared racks, but it’s working so I haven’t had a reason to change. My laptop has 16GB of RAM
Along these same lines, I do use linked racks and load entire setlist. It mostly works great. But my Impact Sounworks guitars stll seem to reload samples when I choose a new song. Even when the next song has the same instrument. So I have nearly instant sound changes except when the song contains one of these guitars. Has anyone else experienced this sort of behavior?
Are you recalling programs which use different sample sets? Preloading can’t help if a sample based instrument is being instructed to load a different collection.
That really depends on how you manage preset changes. if you use Cantabile “snapshot” presets for plugins within your rack (or use the “entire bank” state behavior) and make these dependent on rack state, you should be good as long as rack state doesn’t change between songs. Since nothing changes for your plugin, there shouldn’t be a re-load.
It’s different if you send program changes to your plugin; these will typically be sent on song load, thus triggering a re-load.
This is normal behaviour indeed. With large sample based vst’s (string ensemble,…) and little time to load, I already load a dedicated rack with that sample (violin, pizzicato,…) in the previous state and or song, so it is immediately there. I normally can switch to the next state in a fraction of a note
Thanks for the replies. In this instance, I’m using a linked rack with entire preset saved by Cantabile. I need to verify what I said regarding going to same rack in a different song. It’s definitely the same .nki, but maybe not 100% same settings.
Unfortunately, that will most likely cause a re-load - if it isn’t the same rack state or Cantabile preset, Cantabile will send a new configuration “blob” to Kontakt, which will typically cause Kontakt to completely re-load.
If you’re using Kontakt you could probably run multi timbrally- and the VST3 version gives you 64 midi channels and lots of audio outs.
Just organize your input switching and you may solve your issue.