Some minor improvements

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 Octaves

The on-screen keyboard has two “active” octave ranges — the octaves that are played when using your PC keyboard to play the on-screen keyboard. Previously these weren’t saved and on startup octaves 3 and 4 were always activated.

Now, these settings are saved in the session and optionally in the session state. To control the session state behaviour, activate the keyboard and then check/uncheck which octaves should be controlled by the session state:

Note that although the active octave is saved in the session file, changing it doesn’t mark the session as modified so you won’t be prompted to save just because you switched octaves.

User Notes Field

Most rows in the main window now have an Notes field that can be used to record arbitrary notes, tips, reminders, descriptions etc…

These user notes can also be controlled by session states, although this is disabled by default. To enable it, just activate the row containing the notes you want stored per-session state and turn on “User Notes” in the state behaviour panel:

You can set user notes on plugins, input ports, outputs ports, MIDI and audio routes, MIDI assignments and triggers.

Automatic Save/Discard Options

This is a feature from Cantabile 2 which hadn’t been carried over yet — the ability to control whether session files and set lists are automatically saved or discarded. The default behaviour is to prompt to save, but this can now be overridden depending on why the session is being unloaded:

The first option is the default behaviour when switching sessions via the file menu, or when exiting the program. The “via MIDI” option controls whether to automatically save or discard sessions when switching in response to a MIDI Controller Assignment. The “via Set List” option controls what to do when switching sessions via the set list in Cantabile’s user interface (as opposed to via MIDI).

Each option has three settings:

Yes
Always save the file (but only if modified)
No
Never save the file even if modified
Prompt
Prompt to save if the file is modified.

Automatically Loading Songs on Startup

Previously the relative state between the re-loaded session file and re-loaded set list was fairly loose and typically required selecting a song in the set list to get things into a normal state. This is now rectified with two new Startup options:

Load First Song in Set List
Reloads the last used set list and automatically reloads the first song
Load Current Song in Set List
Reloads the last used set list and the last loaded song

Also, when a set list is loaded now (either via the command line, or via File Open) the first song in the set list is also loaded.

Available now

All of this is available now in build 3044. As mentioned, nothing too exciting — but some useful changes none-the-less.