Thinking about buying Cantabile but have ???

[joeypm]

HI all,

I've been thinking about buying this software for live gigs. I am presently running korg triton le, ensoniq sq1 plus ( SQ1 in great shape and looking to sell) sonar 8 pro on a hp laptop 1.3 ghz.

The questions is Im also thinking about buying komplete 7 for sounds, Will cantabile work well with komplete or is there something that might work better that I should look into....

What does cantabile recommend as top software to use with it?

Thanks in advance,

Joeypm

[dluther]

Hi Joey,

I can tell you that for live gigs, Cantabile simply cannot be beat. It's the perfect live host for combining outboard gear with VST instruments.

Cantabile lite should get you used to the basic features, but buy the professional version; there's a 30-day money back guarantee, but once you start to see what this host can do, you'll find it's the best $140 you ever spent. With the MIDI routing and event filtering along with the auto-load feature, you can actually use this without a monitor (I did once, due to an unfortunate sound-check incident that involved a drummer and a microphone stand...)

Once you have your patches all programmed to respond to your either your Triton's patch or performance changes, you can split and layer from here to eternity, even trigger media playback by pressing a certain note...

Komplete, as far as I recall, is a collection of Native Instruments VSTIs. I don't have Komplete, but I do have B4II, Pro53 and FM7, and they all work flawlessly with Cantabile.

Good luck friend, and do let us know how you get on.

[humphrey]

Hi Joeypm,

first of all: I totally agree to the explanations of dluther. Cantabile is a very flexible live host and for me worth every penny I paid for it. Additionally I can give you some further information concerning komplete 7:

It consists of a bunch of algorithmic vstis (like FM8 or Massive). For these plugs dluthers info is correct: no probreblems here so far.

Then on the other hand we have kontakt 4 with some useful soundbanks (like the scarbee pianos or the hammonds). Here you will get the problem that the load time of the plugs can be really long (depends on the sort of HDD and some other aspects....) but you should calculate some seconds for this. The good news is that the load time decreases after you loaded the plug once. The bad news is that cantabile doesn't remember this after a new start of your PC. If you need fast changes this could however be a problem.

Now you have the possiblity to load all sounds into kontakt using only one session. In this case there would be the possibility to do some routing or adressing by using sub-sessions inside a session or calling up sounds by program change. The disadvantage in this case is that you don't have as mighty operations available as in a session.

To be serious: this is not a special item of kontakt but of using softwaresamplers in live hosts in general and it is one of the most needed improvements for me.

I think you should have a closer look by testing cantabile for the 30-day interval and make your decision afterwards.

good luck, humphrey