Cantabile 3, Preview 6 is now available and adds support for media players: It also includes performance improvements, MIDI assignments for routes, level meter clip indicators, improvements to the insert plugin dialogs and some other smaller improvements and bug fixes. Media PlayersThe big ticket

The other day I received this screen shot from user Pete who seems to have Cantabile running reliably on Linux: That magic that makes this possible is Wine — http://www.winehq.org. If you’re not familiar with this project their about page describes

Recently I’ve received a couple of requests for the ability to enable and disable MIDI routes using a MIDI CC. This seemed like a useful and easy thing to add so I’ve updated Cantabile 2 to support it. Normally MIDI routes are

For the last few weeks things might have appeared quiet with Cantabile 3, but in fact I’ve been really busy. Mostly with GUI work for the OS-X port (which I’ll write about later), but also I’ve been performance tuning the audio

As mentioned previously I’ve been working on getting Cantabile 3 working well with touch screen devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. Here’s a (very rough) demo video: Getting touch support right is mostly an exercise in subtle details, but here’s

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a Surface Pro 3 in order to properly implement touch screen support in Cantabile 3. I haven’t had a chance to work on that yet, but I have installed it and on the Surface’s

Last week while writing blog posts and guides about Cantabile 3, I became quite fed site’s web server. Time for a clean up… Over the years Cantabile’s (and Topten’s) web site has moved around quite a bit. The most recent version

Cantabile supports user-created custom themes (for the main window) and layouts (for the large status panel) and now there’s documentation on how to do it! Creating Custom ThemesCreating Custom Layouts

Cantabile 3 now supports hot swapping of MIDI devices! This has been a long time coming, but finally Cantabile monitors for newly added (and dropped) MIDI devices and will automatically reconnect MIDI input and output ports on the fly! No need to restart Cantabile,

Along with the other more major changes I’ve made to Cantabile this week there have also been a collection of smaller but important improvements including: ability to hide the main toolbarroute iconsinvoking transport actions from triggersper-route setting to ignore global transpose settingsactivity indicators

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

Without doubt, the vast majority of crash reports generated by Cantabile are related to plugin scanning. While Cantabile recovers and continues the scan if you restart it this is not very user friendly. To resolve this Cantabile now performs the scan in a separate

Cantabile now supports a new “Quick Controller” which allows quickly performing certain actions by entering a number followed by a single letter command. For example, to load the song with program number 23, just enter 23 and press ‘S’. The Quick Controller is available

Keep an eye on things with Cantabile 3’s new Large Status Panel. UsageUsing the large status panel is fairly simple — see this guide. Custom LayoutsOn the surface the status panel is fairly simple, but under the covers there’s quite a lot going

Over the last few days I’ve been knocking off a selection of unrelated minor features and improvements. There’s nothing too exciting here, but all part of generally improving usability. Session and Session State Control of Active Keyboard OctavesThe on-screen keyboard has two

Cantabile 3 now supports Triggers which are used primarily for configuring external MIDI equipment when loading a session or session-state. Better Session State ControlFunctionality of Cantabile 3’s triggers is pretty much identical to Cantabile 2 except that all trigger properties are now controllable

Cantabile 3 now supports a slick new “Dark” theme. The setting to switch themes is in Options -> General and requires restarting Cantabile. In the process of making the dark theme, I’ve also cleaned up and modernized the default Light theme making

Cantabile 3 Preview 4 is available now. The main new feature in this release is support for MIDI Assignments. MIDI Assignments took much longer than expected — mainly because I re-designed the user-interface a couple of times over to get it just right. I was

Cantabile 3 now supports custom hot-key bindings. This has been available for a little while now, but I just realized I never wrote it up. It’s pretty simple, in Options there’s a new page “Hot Keys”: You can edit key existing key

It took a bit longer than expected, but Cantabile 3 now supports MIDI assignments! New UIThe UI has been completely redesigned from Cantabile 2 and now lives in a new tab on the home screen: Also, the assignments can be more precisely edited unlike

Today I added a new feature to Cantabile 3 where plugins that only have a single built-in preset slot (eg: Kontakt) are automatically extended to give a generous 128 slots. Besides being a handy feature, this also provides better control and integration of these

Cantabile’s audio engine now builds on OS-X! Although I’m primarily focusing on Windows for the preview builds, in each sprint I’m committing some time to porting pieces of Cantabile to OS-X. For the last sprint I ported all the sample conversion

A few weeks ago I posted about an machine translation of Cantabile into Italian. Thanks to the kind efforts of Cantabile user Stefano Dall’Ora there’s now a non-machine translation available. Stefano has put a lot of effort into this and I’m

Yesterday I finished most of the functionality for session states. Combined with the new routing capabilities of the audio engine it’s feels like Cantabile 3 is really starting to come together. When I originally designed the sub-session support in Cantabile 2 I completely

I’ve recently had a few support enquiries about how to use after-touch in Cantabile so thought I’d write up a quick summary of how it works. BackgroundIn case you’re not familiar with after-touch it’s a MIDI event that some keyboards