Cantabile 3 — Turning One Today!

Brad -

Today is the one year anniversary since Cantabile 3 was officially launched!

The launch however was just the start so I thought it might be fun to have a quick look back… Since launch, there have been 156 builds, 92 new features, 105 improvements and about 60 blog posts.

Highlights

Reading through the release notes for Cantabile 3 over the past year it’s a little overwhelming just how much has been done, but I’ll try to sum it up:

  • Bindings — completely reworked including reverse bindings (sending MIDI in response to an internal setting changing), controller curves and range mapping, the merging triggers into bindings, support for right-click learn binding and more…
  • Audio Time and Pitch Shifting — great to slow down audio for practice, or to pitch shift a song to your preferred key.
  • MIDI handling improvements — 6 new MIDI filters, improvements to existing filters, ability to import/export filters, the in-slot filter indicator, controller curves, per-route velocity curves and more…
  • User interface improvements — slider control curves, mouse wheel and control+click reset on knobs and sliders, font size tweaks, terminology changes, split rack views, menu re-arrangements, tool tips and even some icon and colour changes for colour blind users.
  • Key Range Indicators and Editing — visual editing and display of your keyboard splits and transpose settings.
  • Set List Management — new commands for importing from existing set lists, set list verification, printable set lists and tweaks to pre-loaded set list handling.
  • Solo Buttons — the ability to solo instruments and racks (finally!)
  • Usability Improvements — hiding of certain advanced features, better automatic route creation, improved flow for creating and importing racks, support for different program and note display formats.
  • Audio Engine — support for shared mode WASAPI, ability to flush tail sounds for suspended plugins, audio and MIDI loop-back ports, improved MIDI clock tempo detection algorithm, ability to disable metronome measure sounds and of course ongoing performance tuning.

That’s the bulk of it, but there’s more. See here for full 12 Month Summary.

The Year Ahead

I’m still planning out the year ahead (so no promises) but have some exciting ideas for what I’d like to get shipped.

My initial focus is going to be on refining what’s already there. It’s easy to get caught up in the never ending cycle of adding feature after feature but I want to make sure that over time the product gets easier to use — not more complicated. This effort started with this call for feedback and some ideas for improving state management.

I’m fairly disappointed that I still haven’t delivered on the OS X port so that’s going to be an ongoing effort. (Although I did make some good progress).

Also there are some big ticket items in Trello that I’d like to cross off — things like Live Loop Control, User Control panels and a bunch of little features related to these ideas.

Finally, the never ending quest for stability I’m sure will mean many more hours of digging through crash reports and corresponding with plugin developers to improve the quality of the environment as a whole. It’s a ton of work but worth it, because this.

Thanks Everyone

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Cantabile wouldn’t be anything without the on-going support of it’s users. The feedback and encouragement I get is amazing and without doubt makes the product way better than what I could build on my own.

And, a special shout out to everyone involved in the Cantabile Community— it’s such a great community with lots of lively discussion and users helping each other out.

Thank You!
Brad