I meant with the RAM disk, don’t you have to always have power on? Meaning, you can’t reboot or shut down? How do you manage that between gigs? I have no experience with it, only a vague idea of how it works. I figured it’s part of your RAM presenting as a hdd (which explains the extra RAM), but since RAM is volatile memory… It doesn’t keep, right? You have to reload everything to RAM at reboot, negating the load speed advantage?
Also, out of interest, in the case of a setup like this, I’ve always worked with Ableton and (mostly) audio loops. Is there a specific advantage doing it this way? Because it seems a lot more work, much more complex and it would indeed require a (lot) stronger performance from your system.
I have everything that goes on the RAM drive in a folder on each PC called “RAM Drive Copy,” and a script in AutoHotkey that loads that folder and subfolder structure onto the RAM drive at startup. I have directed Cantabile to only look for VSTs in R:\VST2 and R:\VST3. (R: is the RAM drive.) Technically, most of these files are duplicates of folders elsewhere on the SSD, but it’s nice to have them in one place and structured in a known set of directories; it makes copying them to RAM easier. It’s also possible to have the RAM drive preload an image at each startup, but since the VSTs and support files change from time to time, it’s more straightforward to do it the way I chose, rather then periodically refreshing the folder image. Reloading the RAM drive takes about 3-4 sec. per GB of used files, so maybe 20 sec. or so at the startup. The script reloads the RAM drive, then starts Cantabile. At a typical gig, that 20 sec. is essentially ‘free time’ while I’m connecting cables, putting speakers on tripods, etc.
Where this whole mess saves me time is with the MusicLab RealGuitar VSTs. I’ve tried using the ‘compact’ preset method in Cantabile to access them, but the VSTs don’t transfer several important parameters that way. So, I’m forced to do a full preset load each time, and that includes a couple of GB of sound samples. It takes 15-30 sec. to load that from SSD; it takes 3-5 sec. to do the same from a RAM drive.
Alternative approach: have multiple linked racks, each with an instance of RealGuitar loaded with a separate preset. Then, just use the specific rack for your song. With a pre-loaded setlist, Cantabile will load the multiple instances at startup and keep them in RAM; switching between songs is near-instant (typically less than 2 secs). If you need multiple guitar sounds in a song, simply load multiple racks into the song and simply switch routing. Pretty much instant switching.
This is the way I work with most of my Kontakt instruments (the few I still use…) and all other sample-intensive instruments - have a separate instrument rack for each “sound” and pre-load them into RAM. Do all the tweaking outside the actual samples - use effects, EQ etc as separate plugins to avoid re-loading the Kontakt setup.
Works like a charm for me - haven’t had the need for a RAM disk yet…
Honestly, not really a challenge for a Cantabile setup. I have a couple of songs where I alternate betwen guitar and keys, so everything is loaded at the same time. Typically around 20-30 plugins involved (including effects, EQ) - piano, hammond, string layer, maybe a synth sound layered as well, plus TH-U for my guitar amp simulation. Maybe 30% time load on my little live cube while playing full-handed keyboard chords.
It’s really about choosing the right instruments and plugins that work nicely in a live setup, and about tuning your PC for performance. And maybe not running a DAW in parallel to Cantabile (“me and Cakewalk”??) - easier to render the backing track to MP3 and simply include a media player in your Cantabile song…
@Torsten: Thank you for your suggestions. Interesting ideas for the future, for sure. I know that Cantabile can do more than I currently ask of it, and maybe that will change over time. The situation I’m in is that I probably have 400+ songs created in Cakewalk – I’ve been using it since the DOS days – and I really don’t want to go through the effort of porting all of that to another DAW right now. Is Cakewalk the best DAW out there? Probably not, but it’s the one I know well. I can pull up a song I haven’t played in years, and it will still run, or I can get it working with a couple of changes I remember like my own name. I know that running Cakewalk on a laptop and Cantabile on another PC is duplication, but I use the laptop for visual cues, too. And it provides the monitor and keyboard for the two Cantabile PCs, which are both headless; I treat them as “Muse Receptors with a nicer UI.”
Preloading all of the guitar parts as shared racks is a neat idea. I’ll have to work out the particular details to see if that will save me time. I have so many different guitar sounds set up that I will likely end up with 60-70 racks, trading off time to change songs vs. time to load Cantabile itself. A lot of my sounds are duplicates (or nearly so): once keyboards started having more than 128 program slots, I stopped creating unique sounds and began giving every song in my DAW its own copy of every sound I need in the hardware – which spills over into the software, too. Time to play Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer? I don’t have to remember which guitar, synth, etc. I use; I just load “Sledgehammer Organ,” “Sledgehammer Guitar,” etc. Many of the sounds are duplicates of another song’s part, but I don’t have to remember what goes with what.
RAM drive use may not be for everyone. I look at it this way: I have 32GB of RAM on each Cantabile PC. Unless I create a setup that requires 5+ min. to load at each gig – and maybe mid-gig, if power glitches? – I’m hard pressed to get Cantabile to use 16GB of that RAM. So what else am I going to do with the leftover RAM? I might as well accelerate everything I can. YMMV.
Just curiuos, but what do you use the DAW for in a live setup? If it is only for playback, then - as Torsten suggests - you ought to be able to export the backing track as an MP3 and play that in the media player in Cantabile. If so, you don’t need to work with another DAW or change anything in the way you use Cakewalk, except exporting the song as MP3 and play the MP3 instead of having Cakewalk loaded when you play live. Unless, of course, you are making changes to the backing traack as well while playing?!?
@TorstenH - I use my DAW because I don’t like any of the real-time options. Cakewalk has a ‘set player’ applet and I’m comfortable with it. Cakewalk also has a window to display the measure/beat and the ability to display lyrics. So, the DAW is for playback, but:
I make changes to the backing tracks frequently. I also change the key of songs a lot.
I have a bunch of bindings that allow me to jump around in Cakewalk and solo, mute, etc. tracks. (A few of them also perform double duty in Cantabile.)
Currently, I do not pass timing data between my three PCs. This was absolutely necessary when I was using DIN-MIDI; I’m not sure if it is so now that everything in my system uses USB-MIDI.
Cakewalk makes it very easy to stop a song, make a couple of track changes, and start the song again with complete synchronization of the backing tracks. I’m sure that there is a way to do this in Cantabile, too, but this brings me to my third, and most important reason:
I don’t want to learn another DAW right now. I have a lot of other things going on in my life right now, and while I’m sure Cantabile has great DAW features, I don’t know them all that well right now. I know Cakewalk very well, and I prefer it to Cubase, Logic, Garage Band, etc. You may feel otherwise, but that is my opinion. If I were to switch to Cakewalk as my DAW, then I would need to convert the tracks and backup vocals for several hundred songs to the new format. (Even if I restrict to the songs I play in my current act, that is well over 100 of them.)
At this point, I am treating Cantabile as ‘the best VST player ever built,’ not as my DAW. That may change sometime, and I’m keeping track of all the suggestions offered here, but it’s not an option I wish to consider in August 2023.
