Hi, you can definitely do that with Cantabile. And +1 for Neil’s suggestion. I have been using Cantabile 2 Solo for over a year doing exactly that. I play guitar and an Akai EWI for sax and other wind style vsti’s, in 2 gigging bands.
For the band that uses backing tracks, I load backing tracks for each song, plus Kontakt 4 and the Sax Brothers, some plugin efx, and then S-Gear guitar amp sim (totally awesome) plus some efx for that. I program the FCB 1010 midi pedalboard like this: button 1, start song. Button 2 stop song. button 3 next song on set list. Button 4 previous song on set list. So at the press of one button the song starts. I can even program other buttons to control other things, like Sax growl on the Sax Brothers, or pgm changes on the guit amp sim. However, once I realized I could create a midi track to do all that, and load it with the backing track to run in sync, that really changed the game for me. No more pressing buttons, trying to remember which button does what, or exactly the right time to hit a prticular switch… I just play, and let my programming do all the work.
For the other band that doesn’t use backing tracks, I just have a different set list with my racks and tones.
I did a test once and loaded up to 6 separate tracks…, hardly any CPU load, worked great. Even with all that stuff my CPU load is 15-20%. I have a intel i7 quad core with 8 gig ram, running in a Sony Vaio laptop with an SSD (which I love). Win 7 x64. And BTW the only issue I’ve had was that I had a lot of trouble getting J Bridge to work for my favorite 32 bit plugins, but I think that was just me or my system. I did finally get it to work, but my favorite UAD-1 plugins of course wouldn’t work, so I abandoned that. I don’t know if C3 has a built in bridge. But I did find a lot of awesome x64 plugins, and more are coming out all the time.
And creating set lists is easy, and if you like to change song order on the fly at gigs, if you create one set list with all your songs it’s easy to jump around to other songs. Or you can very easily change the order for the enxt set while you’re on break.
Never any issues in gigs, it’s very stable.
Granted, this is all on Cantabile 2. I am planning on upgrading to Cantabile 3, which handles things a little differently. I just need to find a time period where I have a break, so i can reprogram everything and wrap my head around the new approach.
It does take a little while to figure it all out, and even now, once in a while when programming a new song with a lot of plugins and some specialized commands from the FCB, I make some mistakes and have to dig in to figure out what I did wrong. But I think that’s true of any software that’s as powerful as Cantabile.
FWIW, I did look at Mainstage, and after comparing I’m glad I went with Cantabile.
There are some great videos out there, and Brad (the developer) is extremely responsive to questions. Not to mention all the great help at the forums.
I’ve always been a tube amp guy and an analog gear nut, and I love my 1960 Guild amp (I bought for $25 in the 70’s!). But after learning and expanding the possibilities with Cantabile, I’m now all digital. My backup amp is a $500 laptop I leave in the car. My rig is smaller, my onstage footprint is smaller, and I’ve never been happier with my tone… each song is perfect. No more “well, that tone isn’t exactly what I wanted but I’m limited by my amp, or by my symth patches”.
Enjoy… it’s a cool new world out there.
. I saw the concept of “song” in Cantabile that could do the trick,no !?