Recently I’ve received a couple of requests for the ability to enable and disable MIDI routes using a MIDI CC. This seemed like a useful and easy thing to add so I’ve updated Cantabile 2 to support it.

Normally MIDI routes are controlled by sub-sessions where each sub-session can have a different set of enabled MIDI routes. Sometimes however it’s handy to be able to manually toggle a MIDI route on or off. For this I’ve added two new MIDI Assignments:

  • [RouteName] — Enable On/Off
  • [RouteName] — Disable On/Off

To set this up:

  1. Create your MIDI routes as per normal.
  2. Open the MIDI Assignments window (from the Setup tab)
  3. Press the external MIDI button you want to use — it should appear in the “Controller” drop down.
  4. From the “Assign To” drop down, locate the name of your MIDI route and select one of the assigment types.
  5. Depending on the type of button you’re assigning choose either Toggle or Latch Mode. (see below)

If your the MIDI button you’re assigning is a momemntary button, set the action to Toggle so each press will toggle the MIDI route between enabled and disabled. If your MIDI button alternately sends 0 and 127 CC values you can use the Latch mode and the route will be enabled when the button is on, disabled when off.

I mentioned above there are two assignment types — Enabled On/Off and Disabled On/Off. These both work exactly the same except one is the opposite of the other. The Disabled On/Off option causes the route to be disabled when the MIDI button is pressed. This is useful for setting up simple routing switches where one route is enabled when the button is pressed and the other is enabled when released.

Here’s a simple example. I’ve collapsed most of the UI to highlight the important bits:

  • Two racks — Rack 1 contains a Sax plugin, Rax 2 a piano.
  • Two routes — both from the on-screen keyboard, one to Rack 1, the other to Rack 2.

Note the first route has the MIDI pass-through option selected (the little green arrow in the settings column). This prevents it suppressing matched MIDI events so that when both routes are enabled, both instruments will sound.

I’ve setup one of the on-screen CC buttons to control the routes.

Here are the two new MIDI Assignments:

You can see when the Sax button is pressed one route is enabled:

and when it’s released the other:

One final point. If you’re using sub-sessions, you might want to disable the MIDI routes from responding to sub-session changes. This way they’ll only be affected by the MIDI CC. To do this, right click on each route and choose Sub-session Behaviour and turn off “Enabled”:

This is available now in the latest Experimental Build. Equivalent functionality is currently not available in Cantabile 3.

If you find any issues, or have any suggestions, please get in touch.