Changes to MIDI Assignments

Cantabile 3 Build 3105 available today includes some changes to MIDI Controller Assignments including a new target object kind and a new name.

A New Name

MIDI Assignments have been renamed to “Bindings”. Although the functionality hasn’t changed yet, the new name reflects planned functionality where you’ll be able to create bindings between things not necessarily related to MIDI. This includes assignments between arbitrary objects, from objects to MIDI outputs (ie: MIDI reflection).

I could have renamed them later but it seemed wise to rename them now rather than post launch.

Note: because of this renaming the file format has also been changed slightly using the name “bindings” rather than “midiAssignments”. For this reason, please be aware that if you save a rack or song in this build and then open it in an earlier build, your bindings/assignments wont be loaded. Please backup your racks and songs before using this build.

Indexed Bindings

Although previous builds already supported assignments to plugins, racks and media players, you could only create those bindings inside the same song or rack file. In particular, you couldn’t create a binding in the background rack to say the first plugin in whatever song happened to be loaded.

This new build rectifies this with “indexed bindings”. With an indexed binding you select which rack, plugin or media player you want to control by position, rather than by name. When you choose one of the indexed binding targets (see above screen shot), you’ll be prompted for which object you want to control. So say I wanted to bind to the third plugin in the song’s second rack:

Indexed bindings are available for plugins, racks and media players and provide the same set of controls as the regular named bindings with one exception — you can’t binding to a plugin’s parameters this way — simply because there could be any plugin in that particular position and it doesn’t make sense to control an arbitrary plugin parameter in this way.

These changes are available now in Cantabile 3 Preview Build 3105