Minimally Viable Cantabile 3

Brad -

Over the last few days I’ve received a couple of enquiries asking when Cantabile 3 will be available — to which I’ve been replying “I don’t know”. Not a good answer and it made me realize that without any sort of target date this thing could drag on forever.

So I’ve come up with a plan…

Recently I saw this slide on how Spotify approaches software development:

It’s what the startup community calls a “minimally viable product” and it got me thinking that I should be building a skateboard instead of a sports car — just enough to do something useful, no more and no less, and just get it out.

To help make this happen, I’m also switching to a more agile development process and focusing on completing short sprints of defined functionality. I’ve done a few internal sprints already, but they were fairly haphazard.

(In software development, the term “sprint” comes from the Scrum development methodology and represents a short period of work — typically a couple of weeks — with a definite target date and definite deliverable. The goal is that at the end of the sprint the deliverable is fully “done” — the software itself, documentation, deployment, no critical bugs etc…).

So, the other night I ruled a line under the current sprint, declared it finished and started sprint 4, the goal of which is to complete a minimal version of Cantabile 3. And by minimal I mean really minimal:

  • ASIO (in/out) and WASAPI (out only) audio driver support
  • MIDI In/Out Ports
  • Audio In/Out Ports
  • Plugin hosting
  • Audio and MIDI routing
  • MIDI filters
  • MIDI monitoring
  • Diagnostic capabilities
  • Windows only

Nothing else. No recording, sub-sessions, set lists, metronome, transport controls, media players, MIDI assignments, triggers, etc…

Although it might be light on features, the features that are included will be complete, the main application framework will be there, there will be a setup program, there will be some walk through guides on how to use it, hopefully it’ll be stable (if its not, at least I’ll know) and it will look something like this:

When will Cantabile 3 be available you ask? I hope to have something in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned, more to come…