Colored Slots

One of the surprisingly in-demand features for Cantabile has been the ability to change the color of plugin and rack slots.

Colored racks was one of the first things I implemented in my first attempt at Cantabile 3. Lots of people asked for it and liked what they saw in some early demo videos I made for Cantabile 3. Unfortunately (well fortunately actually) I then I decided to drop the Cantabile 2 code base and started again with a full re-write for Cantabile 3. But I finally reached the point where colored slots had bubbled to the top of the list of things to do again.

There’s not much to it…. right click on any plugin, MIDI assignment or trigger slot and choose a color. That’s it!

Rather than go with a full color picker and letting the user choose any color I decided on a palette of 14 predefined and named colors. The actual RGB values of these colors are customized for each theme to ensure good contrast (that said the colors are much more effective in the dark theme, they’re a bit pastel for my liking in the light theme).

Note that currently you can’t change the color of MIDI and Audio route slots because I thought it might be overkill. If you think it’s important and would like to see this added, please leave a comment on the Trello card.