I’ve been testing out Cantai by scoring up a Haydn Missa brevis for SATB + 2 x S soli + 2 x vln + continuo.
I’ve assigned 6 Cantai VSTs, one for each part and assigned the Cantai ‘Choir Male’ and ‘Choir Female’ for the chorus parts, using solo singers for the two solo sops. What seems to happen though is that I only get either the tenor or bass choir part sounding, likewise only the soprano or alto part. I never seem to get all 4 together. The 2 solo sops seem fine. I’ve checked and double-checked the VST assignments and each ‘player’ is definitely assigned a unique instance of Cantai.
I had to set all trills not to play, and avoid the ‘Cycle’ playback feature, but that’s fine at the moment. Apart from this issue, the playback is pretty passable, especially with NotePerformer handling the strings and organ parts.
Any thoughts, anyone? Am I missing something obvious?
as a completely new v3 of Cantai is coming out today, it might be an idea to try and see if the same happens after you install that one – may be the issue has been fixed (some others have also reported similar behaviour so it will certainly have been on the Cantai team’s radar)
I believe that is a known issue. Also, Cantai, at times, can be very slow to render. If you are rendering the entire work of the Missa Brevis, it will likely like a very long time. It will also likely create/use a very large multi-gigabyte cache.
V2.2.6 broke some things that were fixed in the prior release. I would wait and install the next update as @dko22 suggested. Hopefully it will be a much more usable VST. And it should be released sometime today (July 1, 2026).
yes, the amount of time and potentially system resources it would likely take to completely render a work of this nature is something to be considered. Don’t forget that that the choirs take far longer to render than solo voices – reducing the number of voices the choirs use does help somewhat. I’ve rendered an entire 70 min work in one take but that uses only solo voices and a good deal is instrumental – much less demanding on the system than something primarily choral.
Totally understand that rendering takes time - the issue is that even after waiting for rendering to complete it is not entirely reliable. I’ve installed the new V3 and had a go with a a much shorter 5 part unaccompanied piece using solo voices. When it works it’s amazing, it’s just a bit hit and miss. I can change a voice selection and that may trigger re-rendering, likewise edits, but it seems not to be entirely reliable and I can end up with silence and no rerendering happening. Don’t get me wrong, I am blown away by how good it can be, I just want to know that I am not alone in having somewhat mixed results at the moment.
My initial rendering of a work yesterday took a very long time. It is a composition that is evolving. I’ve noticed that sometimes Cantai re-renders after changes in a voice and sometimes it does not which leaves all or part of that particular voice silent during replay. Eventually, it just did not update at all. I looked at the cache and it was several gigabytes so I cleared it and let it render again without issue but still requiring much time.
I’ve also noticed that Cantai is non-functional without an internet connection (had a brief outage earlier yesterday) even if a paid activation key had been entered.
I tried the “choir” voices today, but they were unable to cope with two notes on a stem or two voices on the staff. (Presumably, IRV will fix the voices and divisi, but not shared stems.)
This caused weird delays in each staff, so that there was overlapping chaos.
yes, I find that can be the case if you’ve got something large and demanding to render. Seems like it’s best to leave alone until the initial render is complete (which with Ottetto takes around as long as the piece takes to play) . Or make a random edit and immediately cancel it – that can get it going again if it doesn’t seem to be rendering. If the voice drops out, save the project and reload – it will retain what’s been rendered so far.
I am also finding that Cantai cannot handle having different dynamic levels, simultaneously, in, for example, SATB settings where one voice should be louder than the rest to bring out a melody line. Each voice, of course, has its own instance of Cantai so that doesn’t make much sense to me.
One wouldn’t expect that from any other VST on the market…sorry, I’m getting a little tired of these odd issues popping up. There’s a repetitive story with every new release/update… fix one thing, break another, add one thing, break another… (rant over) I look forward to a more polished product, soon, since the fundamental concept has now been proven effective and useful.
Edit: And, sometimes exporting to audio is OK and sometimes not so much with voices dropping out randomly.
not sure if I follow. Are you saying that Cantai is ignoring specific dynamic markings in the score? If I want to bring out a particular line as melody, I’ll mark it at least one dynamic level higher than the rest which generally gives the desired result.
So I was using the “old” choral voices female/male for SA and TB respectively, of course. The SAT voices were not abiding by their dynamic marking at all but at a louder level that B was set at. I switched to the Ottetto voices and all was fine. Switched back, same issue. No longer using the “old” choral voices which is too bad because I do like the en masse sound of maxed out # of singers for certain types of choral work now that they are, once again, singing on pitch!
incidentally, has anyone had problems with the audio export in v3? It always worked for me previously but one project of 38’ only records 30’ though it claims to have reached 100%. No difference which audio format is chosen.
I look forward to a more polished product, soon, since the fundamental concept has now been proven effective and useful.