Rack groups feature suggestion

[TiUser]

Hi.

Thinking over some configuration difficulties the idea of "rack groups" came to my mind.

The starting point was when one uses more than one keyboard or controller how to change sounds just for this one without the need to store all the stuff for other keyboards. Imagine you have a piano board and set this up with a piano sound and a synth action board set up with some synth stuff. Now how to change to another synth sound without affecting the piano? Well, one can save a new subsession, but this contains the piano sound too!

A rack group could solve this - something grouping some racks with subsessions that only affect this group but leaving the other racks in other groups untouched.

As usual this is just an idea for discussion as I am sure there are conceptual traps to find out...

...so what do you think?

[TiUser]

...noone?...

[lallis]

Could you not just have a normal session with two racks -- one piano, one synth? Each rack would be set to receive on its own separate channel.

With your keyboards sending on the appropriate channels, wouldn't they trigger the two racks independently without doing anything more? I guess I don't follow your thought properly. There must be more of a problem than I am seeing.

[TiUser]

Could you not just have a normal session with two racks -- one piano, one synth? Each rack would be set to receive on its own separate channel.

That's how to do it - right...

With your keyboards sending on the appropriate channels, wouldn't they trigger the two racks independently without doing anything more? I guess I don't follow your thought properly. There must be more of a problem than I am seeing.

...as usual...
...maybe I'm behind another corner again and have to explain more in detail.

What subsessions in Cantabile currently do is what's called "registrations" in organs and arranger keyboards. That's fine but just the top level. Oh, and BTW I know that Brad does not like the term "registration"...

Lets say I have 3 piano sounds for board 1 in one rack and 3 synth sounds for board 2 in a second rack. To get all combinations I have to save all permutations as subsessions, i.e. 9 subsessions... (piano1+synth1, piano1+synth2... piano3+synth3) Imagine we had "partial" subsessions, then in a first step 3 for rack(group) one and 3 for rack(group) two would do.

Imagine now you add another synth sound - remember this can be more than just one VST when you layer more than one synth and add effects plugins separately in this rack - then things start getting chaotic as I have to save that with all piano sound variations from rack one to get all possible combinations again - in our example here now summing up to 12.

I guess it's easy to understand that if you have more than two racks the necessary permutations to cover all combinations is a mess. Now I hear you say "who needs them all"... and you are right! But you miss one point, how to just create some synth stuff without saving it in a subsessions tied to any piano sound? How to keep some of these ideas and check them on the fly without saving these as subsessions tied to all racks?

There is another interesting point in my idea... How to share rack(group)s with a bunch of sounds and import these in a session you would like to check it with another session? ...without redoing and storing all permutations?

Ok, if one uses few sounds this might sound like overkill but as you see from the example even two racks with some setup multiply easy to a lot of stuff.


Finally there might be another hope - if Brad creates a Cantabile VST... then you could load Cantabile VST into itself... sounds crazy but would be a solution too, maybe a more flexible one as well... because you can endless embed sub-subsessions in a session...

OK, these are my thoughts here...

[lallis]

Lets say I have 3 piano sounds for board 1 in one rack and 3 synth sounds for board 2 in a second rack.

Oh, no! Surely not three!

It is a dangerous hubris, Ti, worse than Doktor Frankenstein.

I see I was thinking in numbers too small to maintain your pace. All is clear now.

[lallis]

...Finally there might be another hope - if Brad creates a Cantabile VST...

Ahhhh. That is every citizen's dream, even among us who think slowly.

...then you could load Cantabile VST into itself...

I only hope that such behavior does not give Cantabile itself a hernia, nor yourself a reputation for perversion. You must promise to be careful.

[TiUser]

LOL

Recursion is an old idea, i.e. loading stuff into itself.

If you know about "xlutop" "chainer" VST you already can do that recursion. It's just that there are no "subsessions", changing things needs always loading time here. Any host that comes as VST can do that "perversion"... LOL...

The simple art of perversion is Wusik_VM, a plugin that wraps another plugin so you can make a set of sounds and wusik loads the needed plugin so it doesn't matter which plugin is the final sound source... a lof of perversion out here...

But maybe you find your filesystem perverted too... hey, it's recursive... LOL

Ok, I admit keyboard and synth players may have a more wicked view here...