Cantabile is so fluid, and there are many ways to get the identical results with many things. What is your approach to combining two existing songs into one?
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This is a great question. In my band, we have many songs, but occasionally at the last minute we decide to tie a couple together with a few transitional chords or something, and actually handling that with Cantabile is difficult.
One option is to not play anything for a few seconds while you load a new song, but it’s not seamless, as racks/plugins are disconnected/reconfigured, so it’s not always possible if you need to keep playing across the join. Otherwise, the alternative appears to be to make a completely new song, copying in all the racks/plugins and recreating all the song states in the new context.
I guess it’s not technically feasible to have two songs loaded simultaneously such that you can switch immediately and without glitches, as the same racks might be used in both songs but with different state behaviour, requiring loading of state data that could stop the sounds dead.
I wonder if it would be possible to have a feature where you can append a song onto the end of the currently loaded one. It would need to be able to handle (or at least warn about) clashes where things in both songs can’t co-reside (e.g. trying to load two instances of the same rack). Probably lots of edge cases to iron out the handling of.
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Thanks for the answer Neil. I never had to do this until recently, and popup decisions to transition seamlessly into another song on stage can be very iffy.
I haven’t really considered the underlying mechanics too much but I believe competitor Gig Performer solves this by always loading the next (couple of?) songs in the setlist in the background, or at least they made that claim. I only used it for a little while and ran into some hanging midi notes and called that the end of the experiment because I was already invested in Cantabile.
Perhaps a feature like this could work for Cantabile as well. Korg Kronos works in a similar way, running basically a double set of fx and new instances of the same synths whenever you switch patches, so sound doesn’t get cut off.
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You can preload songs from the setlist in Cantabile in the Performer version. But there are still a minor transition time so it’s not really seamless.
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I finally did a massive copy and paste. Works fine!
My point is that they would be new synths in gig performer so you don’t get the problem of patch changes within linked racks.
There are different approaches:
Within Cantabile i am only working with linked racks. I have multiple versions of my main synths, e.g. Hive_Brass, Hive_Strings…
The presets within the linked racks are always named after the song that it was programmed for or it is a template that is used for multiple songs. (Templ_soft Pad, Templ_hi Brass,…)
When i have to do a combine Songs, i just load the first song and save it under a new name. Then i add new States to the song. States can be either complete songs or parts of a song. Within the States i just add the corresponding linked racks, adjust the keyranges, CC7 …
copypaste 