Hello,
I’m working with Dorico Pro 6 and Cantai 3.0 and noticed the tenor part is mapped to “Soprano”. The same issue with Baritone. In the Cantai plug in where you select which voice to use, it seems fixed to Soprano. How can I change the part for this instrument to Tenor and Baritone respectively? Thanks.
I do, but the issue is in the Endpoint setup, the “part” field says “Soprano”. It needs to say “Tenor” and I don’t know how to do that.
You have to have a separate instance of Cantai for every individual voice part, first. Then you use the Cantai interface’s dropdown box to select the voice. There really is no endpoint setup of which I am aware.
For instance, in my setup for a SATB with organ work, I have four instances of Cantai, one for each voice.
I have it set up that way. I’ve even tried changing the instrument again to Tenor (which it already was). The end result is for my S, A, T, Bar instruments, Cantai has assigned them as S, A, S, S.
After you select the Tenor line in the play mode (click on your “Tenor”) click on the Track Inspector tab then on the e to edit instrument. When the Cantai window opens for that Tenor voice, click on the elipsis (…) in the upper right corner, scroll all the way down and then click on “Reset instance settings.” You’ll be asked to confirm and will need to click on confirm.
Then click “Back” in the top right of the Cantai screen and you should see something like this:
Click on the dropdown arrow for “Choose a part,” select Tenor, then select the Cantai voice you want to use for the Tenor part.
Hope this helps…
Thank yoU! That was the issue. I needed the “Reset instance settings” to be able to pick the part.
My score is very large. I split the voices into two separate dorico files which solves some issues and created new issues. First, it seems the tempo isn’t 100% the same from the full score and the vocal score. This seems odd because I literally created the vocal score by just deleting all the instruments from the full score. If I start the vocals at the right spot, they get slightly late from the full score as if the tempo of quarter = 60 (just as an example) doesn’t mean the exact same thing in every score.
Another challenge is since the Cantai plug in is monophonic, I have to split each choir out to different instruments. BUT Cantai also seems to have a limit on how many voices you can have. So I created two separate vocal scores. One that has the soloists and semi-choir one and the other that has semi-choir two and the full chorus.
Ideally I wouldn’t need to do this. Everything plays back from the full score and I have sixteen vocal parts assigned to Cantai via the Play tab. The other headache, it seems it is constantly rendering and rendering a big score with loads of vocals takes forever…about three or four hours.
You might want to consider keeping in one file. The tempo differences are probably cause by an absent and perhaps overlooked tempo variation or metronome marking. Cantai still has several bugs and one I have found is that it is not always using the correct rhythm on individual voices that have been changed from the original rendering.
Cantai should be able to easily accommodate the 4 solo plus 4 choral voices that you describe. Rendering also tends to get longer and sloppy the larger one’s Cantai cache is. I would clear the cache, close your project, reopen it and allow Cantai whatever time it needs for a full rendering of the entire project without doing anything to the score while it renders.
Once you have a clean, complete rendering, you can adjust parts (notes and/or lyrics) as needed and it will repeat the render on the part you adjust rather quickly comparatively.
Thanks for being patient with me. It doesn’t look like it can do what I need. I have no way to select half the parts because only 9 are displayed and 15 are needed). It’s also difficult to map which row ties to what part. They are in alphabetical order in the list, so what is Tenor (single) [19456] versus Tenor (single) [5120]?
Image: I have 15 vocal parts but only 9 are displayed and selectable in the parts drop down.
Since Cantai is monophonic, it doesn’t allow chords, I had to break the parts up like this and now realize I can’t even select half of them:
Can you make duplicate of your project, delete all but about 2 or 3 measures and post here. I’m not aware of any limits on the number of Cantai instances. The only thing that definitely would limit that is your system capabilities (RAM, CPU, etc.).
And just a brief reminder that one can scroll up and down both the instance list and the instrument/player list if I recall correctly…correct me if I am wrong as I don’t tend to have that many players/instruments in what I do.
I’m not sure if scrolling works (my VST list is not long enough to test) but there is now a new search bar for VST’s which can be a lifesaver on a long list.
Actually Cantai does allow chords from the score if you a) enable independent voice playback and b) create a new Cantai instance. . See example below which sings perfectly using Ottetto:
Cantai itself cannot sing chords, you’re quite correct there. So you will need 15 separate instances of Cantai for you project to work.
This business of Tenor (19456) v 5120 is a bit confusing but by testing, it should be easy enough to work out which applies to which (I think the lower number is usually the first part created).
Suggest as above that you create a copy of the project with just the first page or so, so we can have a look and render in a reasonably short time. I’m pretty sure it will work if set up correctly
Using separate lyrics for each voice I was able to have Cantai sing each with lyrics.
cantaiMultivoiceTest.dorico (1.3 MB)
looks like you forgot to allocate a singer to soprano down-1 in this example but once done, it works fine as you say and I’d expect.
In my copy I did have a singer assigned. I guess it didn’t save or survive the transfer to another computer. Glad you found a way to make it work.
that’s odd – but then Cantai does sometimes move in mysterious ways!
I’m definitely pushing Cantai to its limits. It took five hours to complete its tasks in progress with my score.
My score features four soloists
Three choirs (these all used choral voices)
So, 15 vocal parts in total. The full score is 1,000 bars lasting an hour.
What surprises me is I thought it would complete the rendering, then only have to render if I changed something on that specific change. But it has to re-render constantly. After five hours to complete the tasks in progress, if I don’t work on the score for an hour or two then switch back to it, it then redoes the tasks in progress taking another five hours again. Is this normal?
I get that my use case is probably VERY unusual. I definitely love the taste I’m having of how this will work but it’s very much unusable for my use case unless I’m doing something fundamentally incorrect. Is my hardware underpowered?
General issues:
My gear:
128 GB RAM
11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900k @ 3.50 Ghz
Windows 11 - 64 Bit pro
SSD Drives
Dorico Pro 6.2.30.6245
Cantai 3.0
You’re spot on with your observations that are what many of us would consider “must fixes” for the next update. It looks like biweekly updates are now a monthly update so we’ll likely have to wait another week to see if any of the musicality issues are addressed.
Hopefully, we will see this product grow and mature organically. It does remain a bit frustrating though that we don’t have any idea what they are actually working on at this stage because there are so many things that need fine tuning. To throw a wrench into hopes of quick fixes with these issues with an announcement for a DAW specific version in 2027 creates pause for concern that bringing the current product to a broadly usable level is no longer a goal. Or that we will need to double our investment to get a usable version. It’s all very smoke and mirrors again…
Waiting a month or perhaps longer to have some of these critical issues addressed without some word from a previously interactive developer can be a little disheartening. Alas, what does one do???
You do not say how long the entire opera takes to perform, but working on a major work probably merits working on a test case, a shorter excerpt or test file to evaluate voices before plugging them into the larger work.
Of course we hope that Cantai will become more capable and eficient as development continues. Until then I expect it makes sense to split a copy the larger work into shorter segments to process separately for audio purposes and then to join them together once the sound is the best it can be.
