Forte OR Cantabile??

[pantelis272]

Forte OR Cantabile??


Post your opinion

[Angel Powerlord]

Hi,

up to now I swear on Forte. I have been on stage with it with my band for over four years now. For Brainspawn stability and efficiency comes before nice GUI or features. That's what matters for pros or semi-pros like me.

For a not-so-up-to-date report on my live rig see:
http://www.powerlord.de/site/angel/Angels_Setup.pdf

Recently I got aware of Cantabile. After some first tests I was really excited, it has a nice fancy GUI and some options Forte currently lacks like integrated MIDI and wave playback or advanced MIDI filtering. Can be done in Forte by using EnergyXT as plug-in but with added complexity.

But after a while I recognized that CPU load is much higher with the same plug-ins in Cantabile compared to Forte. For example the default patch when loading Image Line Sytrus, one of my favourite synths, "Rich strings", gives very soon - playing only some notes together - audio drop-outs and over 100% CPU load. Even with draft and no oversampling quality settings in Sytrus.

In Forte I could play clusters with my full arm, and CPU would not reach 15%.

Same with Hypersonic 2 and the initial patch "Welcome to the matrix". No drop-outs in Cantabile, though, but much higher CPU load than Forte.

I tried different settings in Cantabile with multi-processor support, or MIDI latency, to no avail. maybe I'm doing sth. wrong until now. But what?

I use an Echo Indigo IO cardbus audio interface with ASIO 128samples@44kHz. Laptop is Core2Duo 2GHz with 2GB RAM, WinXP SP3 with a clean lean non-internet audio DAW optimized install. Thanks Martin Walker from SOS magazine. Rock-solid hardware otherwise.

OK, I have to test for some more days now, but right now I'm somewhat disappointed by the high CPU load in Cantabile. Seems that I will stick with Forte for now.

Best,
Angel

[TiUser]

... OK, I have to test for some more days now, but right now I'm somewhat disappointed by the high CPU load in Cantabile. Seems that I will stick with Forte for now.

The meter in Cantabile is not a CPU meter - the developer calls it "timing load"... when one compares to the Windows CPU load meter you might see what I mean.

But anyway, I agree here - this "timing load" in Cantabile is a miracle I do not understand either.

I can see that Cantabile peaks out much earlier than the usual CPU meter even shows up something significant on my Quadcore...

[Edit]
To fill in some numbers from my configuration (non optimized Vista 64, Q8200@2.3GHz, 4GB - asio4all on realtec built in soundcard - 128 sanples buffersize)... I can run 4 Instances of Moog Modular V2 set to polyphony 12 each and 4 instances of Prophet V polyphony set to 5 voices each simultanuously to hit Cantabiles 100% bar under worst playing conditions. Both plugins are quite cpu intensive and have free running oscillators producing significant load even if you don't play anything. When summing up that's 70 voices of polyphony - show me any hardware VA synth that does more in real life... even Arturias HW only gets you 24 voices on two shark DSP's...

But ok, even with full timing load I still have plenty cpu left - referring to the Windows cpu meter - at least 50% or more... and I am also not sure why this is so...

That said, things turn out a bit different with plugins that have internal multicore support... but it still looks like there is something odd here.

[Angel Powerlord]

Hi,

I understood very soon that the Cantabile CPU meter is no pure CPU meter. But you can rely on it in that way, as soon as it goes over 100% permanently, you will have all sorts of nasty audio alias and drop-outs. Even if Windows CPU is below 100%. That display seems to be some internal Cantabile audio stream diagnostics.

Whereas in Forte the CPU meter is quite the same as the Windows CPU load. As soon as a single plug-in hits a load of 90%-100%/number of CPUs you will have drop-outs.

I have tested some more plug-ins in Forte and Cantabile. Every time the same result. Heavily multi-layered and stacked sounds will play fine in Forte even with quickly played two-handed 6-note accords which would equal a 200+ polyphony. CPU display in Forte 40%, just OK for a single plug-in in Forte. On my 3 years old Core2Duo 2GHz.

No doubts that no single hardware synth could deliver this, but this is out of question here.

The point is that the same sounds (.fxb saved by the plug-in in Forte and reloaded in the same plug-in in Cantabile) will easily drive Cantabile to odd audio noise. CPU display up to ridiculous 1000% ...

As I use such heavily stacked and layered sounds in Forte live, Cantabile is not an option for me at the moment.

As I'm a long-year Forte user I'm of course biased towards Forte. Same with you for Cantabile apparently, TiUser, after reading all your posts in KVR and other fori.

To be fair, I really want to give Cantabile a chance, as it looks very cool, has many features I would like, and really seems to be quite complete. But at the moment it seems to be limited by excessive internal CPU load, which limits the amount of layered sounds compared to Forte. Forte is much more basic but maybe more streamlined, lean and efficient.

So anyone interested should download the demos of Forte and Cantabile and check out for himself. For only a few plug-ins and the need for media playback, I think Cantabile should be perfect. If you require symphonic layered multi-sounds, Forte might be the better choise.

But maybe the Cantabile dev could improve on the internal CPU load, then Cantabile really would be very very good.

Angel

[TiUser]

Hi.

You are quite right that I like cantabile a lot but don't misunderstand - I'm really not tied to that when there might be something better.

Your findings are quite interesting. I've downloaded the current forte demo to get a first own impression. There seems to be a new version since I tried it last time - and that's really quite a time ago...

First, installing forte is more hassle than cantabile.... first a reboot(!)... then tweaking the audio buffer size to a working value is a pain - needs always a restart (and to re-enter some instruments to create some load - as racks can't be saved in the demo).

On my Vista machine I could not get forte to work from the initial install. 64 sample buffer - which seems to be the optimistic default in forte - didn't work on my machine, nor with Asio4all on the internal Realtek audio chips neither on my external TI audio.

Comparing just the normal cpu load meter with forte and cantabile looked pretty much the same.

The funny thing is that I don't necessarily get dropouts when cantabiles load meter jumps over 100%... that's one magic I do not really understand either.

Fact is with forte I got crackles and some really odd audio behavior early too, with less than 30% cpu load... which is pretty similar to cantabile. Maybe it's vista, maybe my lack of knowledge how to tweak forte. If you have any tricks or basic info to get started better - let me know.

I am aware that Vista is not the preferred OS for audio... I have a second boot partition with XP too but haven't used it for a while as benefits were few and because I do not have net connect there too doing some things in there is quite uncomfortable... maybe I'll give forte another test shot under XP soon. But I do not expect wonders either... maybe a dual core on higher frequency is currently the better choice over a slower quadcore...

From your experience I understand your rating - it's clean and logical.

Unfortunately I could not make forte running better than cantabile on my machine and to end with - yes, I wished I could use 100% of my CPU instead of average just 30% for audio... regardless with which app...

[bradr]

Just a note to let you know I am following this discussion and currently investigating the problems being described.

In particular I've been looking into Sytrus Rich Strings and agree there seems to be some issues there. Initial investigation however suggests that the load is almost entirely within Sytrus itself and the overhead introduced by Cantabile neglible.

One thing which could improve this situation is something I've been working on over the previous weeks - the ability for Cantabile to do extra buffering to smooth out the audio load. I'm not sure if this is related but I know many other hosts do this.

I will post more information when I have it.

[TiUser]

Hi Brad.
Good to know you're looking into this...

The impression I have with the load meter is that finally Cantabile behaves somehow like a single threaded app - even I know and have proved it doesn't... I can clearly see the spread load in windows task manager.

Some plugins seem to have separate threads for their gui like Arturia MMV2 which has a really fancy one... but still with approximately doubling load by opening all those gui's I end up with about 65% cpu load when I roughly hit Cantabiles timing load.

Looks like resource conflicts somehow increase with cpu cores working in parallel on plugins. Finally summing up all and pumping out audio through one interface seems to make the bill...

I hope you'll find a good trick to make Cantabile work smoother here.

[bburtin]

Forte OR Cantabile??

I was a happy Forte user for 5 years, and now I'm in the process of switching to Cantabile. The big win for me is that Cantabile has support for mappings at both the session level and subsession level. In Forte, if you want to change one of your global mappings, you have to manually update every scene.

One other nice benefit of Cantabile is that you can run multiple instances. So if you have two controllers, you can have two totally separate racks, and the setup for controller 1 has no effect on the setup of controller 2.

Forte is a great app, but as my setup became more elaborate, I started to feel paralyzed, afraid to make any new changes. Cantabile is a little more complicated, but after I got past the learning curve, I work much more efficiently than I did with Forte.

[bradr]

I've now spent a lot of time looking into this and have some more information to report.

1. Sytrus is particularly challenging as it seems to take a considerable performance hit for every note-on event. I've seen it take up to 6 millisecond to process 2 note on events. With a small audio buffer this can easily cause a drop out. I've been in correspondence with the developers of Sytrus but they've been unable to reproduce it but we're still investigating. Note that this is host independant - it occurs in every host I've tried.

2. Cantabile's performance is equivalent or better under nearly every test I tried when running under "normal" circumstance.

3. The current build of Cantabile doesn't recover well from a continuous processing overload.

4. The additional audio buffer code I've been working on for some weeks now helps this situation considerably, providing better stability and handling of load spikes in exchange for higher latency. For example, the new build I'm testing with runs better with 5 x 64 sample buffers than the old build with 1 x 512 sample buffer.

In other words, Cantabile's overall performance is as good as other hosts, but suffers from excessive audio spikes. The new buffering code will help by smoothing processing load over many smaller audio cycles.

I'm now working on finalizing this new code - which mostly involves getting MIDI back in sync.

Stay tuned.

[TiUser]

...Stay tuned.

I am...
Sounds very promising... looking forward to the next build.

[Angel Powerlord]

Hey, seems to be a fair and very constructive discussion here.

@ TiUser:
Yes, Forte needs some initial tweaking and testing first to get optimized audio performance with low latency. That really can take some time because after any change on the audio engine you have to restart Forte.

The results with Asio4All vary largely from PC to PC. On my laptop I have always an Asio4All install with me for emergency if something is wrong with my Indigo soundcard. I also have a PC where I can't get Forte to work with Asio4All at all.

But with my Echo Indigo IO card and many other pro audio devices as reported in the Brainspawn forum, Forte is really really reliable at low latency, since years.

@ bburtin
Yes, Cantabile seems to be much more flexible as it lets you reconfigure the complete selection of plug-ins from session to session. So if you would like to include new plug-ins for a specific song only, no problem.

In Forte you have to plan in before what you really need during performance. But the advantage is that plug-in loading is the most critical moment. In Forte you do that once when you open your rack. I'm a bit scared to reload/unload plug-ins between songs during live performance. But I'm willing to give it a try, too.

@ bradr

Hey, first at all, congratulations, Cantabile is really a nice program! And good to see that you are also listening to your customers or at least, potential ones.

As said, at the moment I get better polyphony without dropouts with all of my plug-ins in Forte. Could be dependent on the audio device, CPU type and so on, of course. It's good to hear that you have some ideas how to improve Cantabile further and I definitely will try it again. In fact I wish you to succeed because there are many features I like in Cantabile.

And some competition is good for the business, anyway.

Bye,
Angel

[bburtin]

I'm a bit scared to reload/unload plug-ins between songs during live performance.

Really?!? I'm pretty sure my plugins all load at the time that I load the Cantabile session. Either that, or Cantabile loads so quickly that I didn't notice.

[TiUser]

Plugin loading times vary strongly on several conditions in cantabile.

The almost instant way changing sounds in Cantabile is via subsessions. (I think that's similar to scenes in forte). That's the situation where all plugins have been "preloaded" with a session. There are some triccy options to control each subsession here - like suspenting individual plugins to save CPU when these plugins are not needed at all. Only when samples need to be loaded with a change can take quite some time. However, some stuff is a bit technical here...

Loading a new session in Cantabile does not necessarily mean that all plugins are reloaded again. There is optimized session switching in Cantabile which "reuses" the plugins already loaded. However, loading a new session always means a short mute as the audio engine is stopped for that moment. So that's not for flying sound changes but it can be really fast too - depending on the previous and new sessions content.

Sometimes more flexibilty in Cantabile has some tradeoffs - true. I guess I rememer some users just use one session and do all sound changes with subsessions. Looks like this is comparable to the way how forte does it.


Fair and constructive discussion - well I agree, it's a nice place here...

...and there is never absolute perfection anywhere in any software. But one needs to find out what things can do. I think that's essential.

Finally Brad has really done a fine product in a niche where you hardly find anything comparable among tons of DAW's. And he still makes it better and improves it regularly.

[pantelis272]

Angel, you have an awesome setup..! Oh boy! I want 2 personal monitors too..
I am jealus!

Cantabile crashed on me during live gig, on sub-session switching...it took me a minute (wile the rest of the band was playing..) to reload my session..! i have many many many vst's....(30)

When i tried forte 2 at home...after an extensive and power use of cantabile..I felt like imprisoned...i use 2 controllers...even a midi assignment is hard!!
I like cantabile but it needs improvements on interface and stability..! Why would a programmer use Microsoft office 2007 gui??!
And i have found a bug that it is devastating..!!
Have you ever tried to delete a rack and then the program crashes?? or to save session and then when you open it cantabile does not recognize it like a valid file?
Generally, have you encountered "broken racks"?

[TiUser]

I remember an issue with racks when partial send is involved - but that should have been fixed with the latest update...

If you are using many plugins it's possible that one of the plugins is the reason. Try to check out with multi processor support set to "compatibility mode" instead of "aggressive mode"...

You can also try "jBridge" and isolate critical plugins which helps not crashing Cantabile but just the involved plugin...

It's a nightmare to have a crash on stage - so we should try identify the problem. I am sure Brad can fix it if it's really Cantabile.