Cantabile now supports selectively enabling and disabling loopback ports.

How To Use It?

You can now enable or disable a port's support for loopback routing in the port's settings available through:

  • Environment Input Ports - ie: Tools -> Options -> Audio Ports and Tools -> Options -> MIDI Ports
  • Rack Input Ports - ie: open rack, File -> Rack Properties -> Audio Port and MIDI Ports tabs.

Double clicking on an input port now includes a new setting "Enable Loopback":

Note that although loopback ports appear as output ports, the setting to enable/disable it appears on the input port that receives the looped back signals.

What are Loopback Ports?

Loopback ports are special ports that appear as output ports and loop anything sent to them back to their associated input port.

There is a one audio cycle delay between sending signals to a loopback port and it appear at the input.

Why This Change?

With other improvements over the years, loopback ports have become less useful but are still used for complex setups or edge case audio/MIDI routing scenarios that doesn't quite fit into what Cantabile can do internally.

Previously Cantabile automatically created a loopback port for every environment and rack input port.  However, loopback ports are rarely used, and when they are used it's usually only on a single port.  Having them appear in the user-interface for every input port was causing too much clutter.

Notes

  • For loopback ports to appear in the user-interface, you must enable Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Advanced -> Show Loopback Ports.
  • When Show Loopback Ports is turned off (hiding all loopback ports) routes connected to loopback ports still work.
  • Disabling a port's loopback support makes the port completely unavailable for routing - it neither appears in the UI and previously created routes to the loopback port will display an error the port's loopback has since been disabled.
  • By default, new ports have the loopback support disabled.  If you want to use loopback features you now need to manually enable it on the port.
  • To retain backwards compatibility, any existing ports loaded from settings or from an existing rack will have the loopback support automatically enabled.  If you don't need it, you can manually disable loopback on those ports to remove them in the UI.
  • Disabling the loopback support on an audio port saves a little processing over head as the loopback audio mixing is disabled.  Disabling loopback on MIDI Ports has no effect on performance.

Available Now

This is available now in build 4214.