Happy New Year!

I've decided to start the new year with a series of minor updates and tweaks to Cantabile - some minor things that have been on the todo list for too long and some that have popped up recently and the first is a new command line option to set which audio driver to use.

Cantabile has always had the ability to switch between various configurations, but a recent feature request on the community forum made it clear the sometimes it's handy to switch audio drivers while keeping all other settings the same.

Starting with build 4208 this is now possible with a new command line switch --driver.

Using a Simple Driver Name

The drive option expects the name of the audio driver to use to be passed following a colon:

cantabile.exe --driver:"Null Audio"

Note that if the driver's name has one or more spaces you need to enclose the name in double quotes like shown above.

Advanced Usage

If you have multiple audio drivers with the same name, you might need to use a fully qualified name for the driver.  These can be found by browsing Cantabile's settings.json file (search for "audioDriver") and consist of three parts separated by colons.

For example, the fully qualified name for the ASIO4ALL driver is as follows:

cantabile.exe --driver:Asio:{232685C6-6548-49D8-846D-4141A3EF7560}:ASIO4ALL v2"

The three parts are:

  1. The audio driver type Asio, Null, or WASAPIOut
  2. The driver's ID
  3. The driver's name

The Setting is Saved

It's important to note that using the command line option will overwrite the currently selected driver in settings.json.

This means the next time you start Cantabile without the command line switch, the driver previously specified on the command line will be used.  ie: it's not a one time override.

If you want to regularly switch between two or more drivers you should create separate shortcuts each explicitly specifying which driver to use.

How to Set Command Line Options

In case you're not familiar with command line options, these can be specified by either typing them directly in a command prompt:

Or you can create a program shortcut, and set it there.  For example to create a desktop shortcut that start Cantabile will the Null Audio driver:

  1. Right click on the Windows desktop and choose "New" -> "Shortcut":

2. Click the browse button and choose the Cantabile.exe file or, type it in:

3. Give the short cut a name: (in this case I'm creating a shortcut to start Cantabile withe Null Audio driver selected)

4. A new shortcut will be created on the desktop, right click it and choose "Properties":

5. You can then enter the command line arguments at the end of the target:

Available Now

This is available now in build 4208.