Cantabile 3 now supports Recording (and Auto-Recording). What’s more it’s been cleaned up and simplified considerably compared to Cantabile 2.

What’s Changed

If you’re familiar with recording in Cantabile 2, you’ll notice quite a few changes:

  • In Cantabile 2 the audio and MIDI recorders were completely separate. In v3, these have been consolidated into a single “Recorder” that handles both. The file name format, location and auto record settings have all been combined into one set of settings.
  • Selecting what to record has changed from simple Input/Output options to selecting which ports you want to record.
  • Each entry in the recording list now represents a single recording. In Cantabile 2 if you recorded audio and MIDI at the same time there would be two entries in the list.
  • For MIDI files there’s no longer a recording format option. Everything is now recorded in real-time format and the musical time formats are no longer supported (the reasons for this will become clear later)
  • Unlike Cantabile 2 which combined all recorded MIDI into a single track, Cantabile 3 creates a separate MIDI track for each recorded port.
  • Since Cantabile 3 no longer has a concept of master bus it can no longer be used to control the format of recorded wave files. Rather each selected port is included as a set of consecutive channels. Eg: recording two stereo ports results in a wave file with 4 channels.
  • Cantabile 2 had a per rack option to control whether it should be recorded. This is no longer supported. Rather, to record from inside the session you can create a route to a port and record that port. For this reason, ports don’t actually need to be connected to physical devices in-order to record them.
  • The “add lead-in” and “add lead-out” settings have been removed.
  • In Cantabile 2 there was an option to save the recordings list with the session. This is no longer supported. However, the recordings list is now saved in a special file in the root of the folder selected as the recording location. By changing the recording location you can manage multiple sets of recording lists.

Playback

The recorder is now functionally complete except for one area which I still need to address — the ability to easily playback recordings. In Cantabile 2, there was an option to load a recording into a media player.

This doesn’t map very well anymore. I know how to improve this but it relies on support for loop-back ports — which havn’t been implemented yet (but probably will be soon).

Until then you’ll need to manually load the recorded files into a media player in order to play them back.

Available Now

All this is available to licensed v2 users now in build 3076. Also, there’s this guide which goes into a little more detail on how to use it.

If you have feedback or find issues, please leave a comment on this Trello card.