MusicRadar

Cantabile doesn't come with any instruments or effects - you'll need to supply these.

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• Review

So what's a sub-session? Well, Cantabile's settings are stored as sessions, and a sub-session is a named variation within a session. For instance, a session might contain a selection of racks with their own instruments, effects and routings – a variation of that session using the same plug-ins but different mutes, program banks, MIDI triggers, routing entries and sync options could be saved as a sub-session for fast recall.

This is assuming that your plug-ins don't have long patch-load times, which is beyond Cantabile's control.

Though we've stressed that Cantabile is not a DAW, it can record and play back audio and MIDI, making it a good sketchpad for generating ideas that can be tweaked in a separate editor. Performances can be saved, too, as it can record the output of plug-ins, as well as incoming audio.

As for recording, this can be engaged manually or set up to start automatically when Cantabile receives MIDI data or audio above a predetermined threshold. Recordings can run in sync to the master clock or be triggered individually. WAV, MP3 and MIDI files are supported, too, although there's no timestretching of any kind.

Studio tools

Although Cantabile is intended for live performance, it has a few features that are more at home in the studio than on the stage. Some of the most inspiring aspects of these are the morphing and randomisation tools located at the top of the individual plug-in editors. They aren't unique, but they are to-the-point.

There are three such tools, including Randomize, Randomize Between and Morph, with a masking feature that enables you to choose which plug-in parameters are to be affected and which should be left alone. Randomising is accomplished simply by clicking on a dice icon, and there's a slider to adjust the percentage of variation that should occur.

You can also automate the process via the Animate button – activating this will cause Cantabile to randomise a plug-in's parameters at set intervals, so that you can sit back and wait for something to take your fancy.

You can exert some control over the randomisation process with the Randomize Between mode, whereupon the program will generate random presets that lie somewhere between two selected patches.

Lastly, Morphing is a variation of this, but without the random aspect – instead, you select two patches and simply use a slider to blend between the two.

Summary

Cantabile is a powerful and deeply flexible program. In practice, it performs well, and though we did crash it once during the review period, it wasn't a repeatable problem. Multicore support means that it went easy on our machine, and 64-bit Windows users will be glad to know that there's a version for them.

It's true that there are a handful of dedicated plug-in chainers and modular hosts out there, and some of them make fine live performance tools. However, Cantabile was designed from the ground up for live performance, and it shows. Frankly, we'd be hard pressed to conceive of a live scenario that Cantabile couldn't enhance.

It's not for everyone, but if you're a performing musician looking to maximise the live experience, you really should try it out. Note that there's a cut-down version, Cantabile Solo, which lacks sub-sessions, triggers and the MIDI routing table.