A few weeks ago I released a preview build of Cantabile 3. Since then I’ve received some great feedback. I’ve also released a some follow up builds to address the issues raised. I think it’s now stable — so what’s next?

For Preview 2 I’ll be focusing on the following areas.

VST 3 Support

I’ve decided to tackle this one early as it’s going to need more testing than most other areas. There’s a fair bit of work here as the VST 3 API is not at all similar to the VST 2.

The plan is to get at least basic VST 3 support into the next preview so that I can find out what does and doesn’t work as soon as possible.

On-screen Keyboard

Although the on-screen keyboard is completely useless for real performance, it’s an essential tool for testing.

Most of Cantabile’s development I do on a Macbook and often I don’t have a MIDI keyboard handy. So far I’ve been using a virtual MIDI cable and and Cantabile 2’s on-screen keyboard, but that’s getting tedious.

Metronome

Again the focus here is on testability. The current build of Cantabile 3 is hard-coded to provide timing information of 120bpm 4/4 with the transport stopped. Since there are some plugins that need real timing information in order to be fully functional adding metronome support lets me test those plugins.

More OS-X porting work

Although much of the hard working for an OS-X version is already done, there’s still a fair way to go. Rather than do this all in one hit I’m going to break it down into a few stages, the first of which is to port Cantabile’s audio sample conversion and re-sampling routines.

I’m hoping the time frame for this preview will be about 3–4 weeks but there’s a few unknowns in all of the above — hopefully nothing too surprising. Stay tuned…