A question for any Cantabile users that are also be users of PG Music’s Band-In-A-Box.
I have been trying to use Cantabile 3, which handles the setup of my keyboards, with Band-In-A-Box, but continue to have problems with BIAB having a conflict with the audio output when Cantabile is loaded and using the same audio output device. This does not appear to be an issue with use of ASIO or WASAPI in either software, as I believe I have tried all combinations with no success.
BIAB is a 32-bit system and does not play well with other audio devices trying to share audio outputs, although when only BIAB is loaded, it works fine with no issues. I like to use the vast variety of styles available in BIAB, to noodle around in composing or just to develop some new backing tracks.
I have recently resurrected the product called Voicemeeter, based on previous recommendations in this forum by Torsten, but with Voicemeeter loaded, I can’t seem to get BIAB to recognize Voicemeeter, although that may be due to my limited understanding of the product.
If any forum member has been able to successfully use Cantabile in conjunction with BIAB, I would appreciate if you could provide some guidance.
Most asio drivers will take exclusive control of the audio hardware as this gives the lowest audio latency and when the asio driver is running other audio apps won’t be able to get in.
Have you tried setting Cantabile to WASAPI and selecting “Shared Mode” in the sample rate selector?
Appears that using Voicemeeter, I can keep Band-In-A-Box open along with Cantabile3, although the Cantabile Media Player doesn’t sound, so still some more tweaking needed.
For some reason, however, I had to use the MME driver with BIAB and the WASAPI driver with Cantabile3, as when I used ASIO, the sound was coming out very distorted.
Perhaps Torsten might be able to chime in on how to get ASIO working correctly with Voicemeeter or if I need to change some parameter to eliminate the distortion.
If you do have an ASIO audio interface, select that as the A1 playback device so that its buffers and sample rates, etc. control those of Voicemeeter. You likely will get better stability of the ASIO choice then.
If BIAB is only presenting the MME portion of Voicemeeter, that is surprising to hear. You should be able to select the MME, Wasapi, ASIO VAIO, and – in Voicemeeter Pro – the ASIO Voicemeeter Insert modes.
Stability can be an issue on some systems. I recommend setting every Playback and Recording device in the Windows Audio control panel to the same sample rate and bit depth (44.1/16 for instance). That removes some conversion work needing to be done by Voicemeeter if you have many rates presented to it and the system. Try an ASIO buffer for your ASIO interface of 512 for starters, and lower it to 256 or lower only after getting things to work. For performance, any buffer setting higher is usually unacceptable due to the latency delay of monitoring yourself. I’ll warn you that some people never get stability with anything other than MME on their systems, but hopefully that is not your situation.
The inserts mode of ASIO that Voicemeeter Pro permits is very powerful, but is advanced, so start out with the simple VAIO as your primary output.
Terry… I now have Band-In-A-Box and Cantabile3 open at the same time and both working. I’m using Voicemeeter for the BIAB side and ASIO4All on the Cantabile3 (which is accessing two ASIO outputs).
Not sure why I was having a problem with BIAB earlier, but by just following the steps you noted, got it working!
My next step is to also have Sonar X3/Platinum open, so I can easily flip between BIAB and Sonar for saved songs or accompaniment. I’ll work on that for a while and if I encounter an issue I can’t resolve, I may appeal to you for additional help.
Two things to note. First, I haven’t tried to use BIAB with C3 together but I can tell you that in order to use any two or more audio apps together at the same time with ASIO, you need to have a “multi-client” ASIO driver. Not all ASIO drivers are multi-client. I happen to use MOTU ASIO for my MOTU audio interface and that allows me to use multiple audio apps with ASIO at the same time with no issues. One caveat is that BIAB is very finicky about sample rates and is most stable at 44Khz. Therefore everything else must be set at 44Khz. Many times BIAB will randomly revert to 44Khz when everything else is set at 48Khz screwing up the pitch while trying to maintain the MIDI clock. Not fun and quite disconcerting. With BIAB as a team player on a multi-client ASIO driver, 44Khz is key to be set in everything. As far as ASIO4ALL goes, sometimes it is able to wrap the hardware single client ASIO driver into a multi-client driver. Your mileage will vary with that. ASIO4ALL simply will not do that with my Sonic-Core ASIO drivers. Find out if your hardware ASIO driver is multi-client. If not, try ASIO4ALL and make sure if BIAB is part of the rig everything is set to run at 44Khz. SImilar to Voicemeeter you might also check out the O Deus ASIO Link driver which is also capable of mixing WDM and ASIO and also uses a mixer interface paradigm on top of your audio interface for extensive flexibility in routing multiple ASIO clients as well as incorporating WDM, WASAPI and audio routing over IP. All of these are fully integrated to work together and be routed from one to the other, irregardless of being 32 or 64 bit. As with multi-client ASIO, you can send your BIAB MIDI and audio, to or through C3 along with a backing track say from Media Player or VLC and record the whole thing in your DAW or stream out over the net. Again, with BIAB everything must be at 44Khz to work but the possibilities are all there.
That is not exactly true. For external inputs to work with two or more ASIO device drivers stacked together, you would need multi-client drivers that cooperated with each other.
Also, for a single MIDI interface to work with two applications, that MIDI interface driver needs to be multi-client.
But on the audio output end and app audio mixing end, it is different scenario.
Motu Asio (which I think really is ASIO4ALL from the look of it), Voicemeeter and Voicemeeter Pro, and ASIO4ALL all allow several applications to talk to the ASIO at the same time, as does the native ASIO driver.
I agree it is best to set everything at 44.1kHz.
Even using ASIO, you can send as many apps to the ASIO in-points as you like. They mix at the in-point.
I just tried VoiceMeeter on the SoniCore SCOPE ASIO driver which is notorious for not being multi client - It crashes ASIO4ALL. VM works perfectly with 24 SCOPE ASIO channels! For the MIDI I use the MidiMate virtual drivers to get around the multi MIDI routing limitations. The native MOTU ASIO driver is not ASIO4ALL but it plays very well with it. I’m going to see if I can get VM to work with ADAT. Along with some critical testing of timing and jitter between apps that will be the final test for me. Otherwise VM appears to be very nice, no noticeable latency either. Thanks cfcboc!
You do not use Voicemeeter AND ASIO4ALL at the same time - there is no need. Voicemeeter is like ASIO4ALL but with sliders, EQ, balance controls, etc. If you use another ASIO device with Voicemeeter, that device is expected to be a hardware device.
You are correct that MOTU ASIO is definitely not similar to ASIO4ALL one bit - I was thinking of the MAGIX Low Latency driver, which I also have installed.
MOTU ASIO and Voicemeeter do work very well together, I agree. I do it all the time.
By the way, I have a fiber optic cable running between my ADAT A output into the same ADAT A input, which allows me to route things to that output and use it as an input to a DAW or other device. I let Cuemix control the signal flow. The same trick could be done with an unused S/PDIF.
Sorry for not being clear: It’s the SonicCore ASIO that crashes ASIO4ALL with a FUBAR message from ASIO4ALL… it seems pretty obvious that one would not use VM and ASIO4ALL together!
That’s understood - I could not type clearly last night either!
(I was a bit sleepy…)
Vincent Burel at VB-Audio really works hard to get his tools working right. But, I have encountered situations where I could not obtain stability at all - I have one AMD machine here that is notorious for that. So, it is a rather touchy subject, as not all machines play fairly!
jocar37… I use the BIAB plugin, but not too often, in my DAW, and that seems to work fairly well, although still a work-in-process for PG Music. It’s main benefit to me is to get BIAB’s great sounding RealTracks accompaniments as audio tracks in the DAW with the chords of a song I’m working on.
I have not yet tried to open it in Cantabile Solo because I didn’t see a use for it in the way I do music.
But I do use the 2020 version of BIAB with the latest patch, so will be glad to try it out sometime in the next couple of days and will let you know.
I had a brief opportunity yesterday to load the BIAB (2020) plugin into Cantabile Solo.
Yes it loads and appears to work with Cantabile just fine. I only tested the default playing some chords I typed into the plugin screen and they played back correctly using the default accompaniment style (ZZJAZZ).
As I mentioned in the earlier reply, I don’t have a need to use that plugin in Cantabile at this time, only using it occasionally in my DAW. Although I do many song arrangements using the unique BIAB styles, both MIDI and audio tracks, I find it simpler to setup the song with chords in BIAB, fine tune it by tweaking the styles and soloist options, and then simply export the BIAB song into the DAW. I think as BIAB continues to improve the features available via the plugin, I may experiment with it more. The BIAB forum is the best place to get answers on how to use or issues you have…
Yep, the latest BiAB is pretty useful. During the lockdown here in Texas, I turned out 5 or 6 start-from-scratch tracks per week for our Church. Started out replacing most of the BiaB parts with live, after a few weeks, we figure the guitar parts were better than our guitar player. I’ve used BiaB for scratch parts for years and re-done bass and keys mostly. I still do bass, but some of the piano parts are pretty good. Still play organ and synth parts just because I usually have something (overly complicated) in mind.
