In John Barron’s live stream about Cantai there was sometimes an icon at the bottom of the screen next to the “Follow playhead” check box. When changes were made to a choral part it would show that Cantai was rendering. Once rendered it went away. I’m not seeing that at all when using Cantai, even with 4-part choral music with the Cantai settings at 10 voices per part with about 70 measures, slow tempo (and completely clearing the cache).
I suppose it could be rendering so fast I don’t see it. The reason I’d like to see it is that with choral music, with the voices assigned to choral I’m having various voices drop out or never play to begin with. Without waiting who knows how long for it to render I don’t know if it’s not yet rendered or if there is a problem with cantai.
Just guessing: do you have the Dorico upgrade from yesterday?
Updating to the latest Dorico version will fix it. It works fine for me
Do you have pre-roll timing (playback options) set to something other than 0? for now it has to be set to zero until they fix it.
I have had drop outs also.
One suggestion was not to have the singers sing on the first beat when the song starts if that is what you have.
Also replying to @TonH
According to Help->About I have Version 6.2.20.6183 (Apr 24 2026) which is the latest version.
I have pre-roll to zero. (I had forgotten this option existed untill I heard it mentioned in another post last week).
I have a 4-bar piano introduction in the one piece I’ve been testing with. So technically I’m using a modified “official” template that has Cantai and Etude elements. I’m going to check it with just the “official” template and manual assignment. If that makes it work I’ll post that info here.
The official template seems to work better than the hybrid. However, when I try to switch from the official Cantai template to the Silent template Dorico freezes.
(Perhaps this should be split into two threads as there are parts that don’t reflect the title of the thread)?
@JAMES_GILBERT The freezing issue is odd and would warrant uploading a diagnostics report from Dorico for one of their folks to review. I encountered something very similar to what you described with voices not playing or dropping out because one of the voices was still rendering.
It can be difficult to know that rendering in any of the voices not on top is still active when Cantai interface windows are overlapping. I have also seen that little green dot with the rendering message both at the top left and bottom left of the Cantai interface window. If the windows are overlapped when you have multiple Cantai voices, it is very easy not to see that one continues to render.
If all voices have not fully rendered, the spotty playback (missing voices, voices dropping out) will occur without fail in my experience.
I have been sending dump files when I start up Dorico.
After changing the playback template to Cantai, I am unable to change the playback template to anything else.
I am unable to close the project to open another one.
Dorico is not closing properly. I see Cantai (using nearly 3Gb of memory) and Dorico in the windows 11 task manager.
Also, I’m still not seeing the icon next to the Follow Playhead button that was in the live stream video.
My latest problem is that after waiting about 30 minutes for it to render, the program freezes.
I’m unable to upload a diagnostic report as it is larger than the 4Mb max allowed.
I wonder if it would be possible for Cantai/Dorico to extend the rendering notification- it’s really helpful to see ‘rendering in progress’ but it would be great to also have something showing ‘rendering all finished’.
as Ulf will tell you, you can upload your diagnostics to a file sharing site (such as OneDrive which you probably already use if you’re on Windows 11).
At any rate it’s not encouraging what’s going on. I briefly tried out the Cantai template to see if my old projects would suddenly render in the release version. They still didn’t so I deleted it from my system as I’d rather control the Cantai setup myself it I’m going to use it.
The progress notification will only appear in the status bar if you accept the request that appears asking you if you want to allow Cantai to connect as a remote control client. This request appears the first time Cantai is instantiated. Check in the Remote page of Preferences whether Cantai is allowed to connect there.
I don’t remember seeing that the first time I loaded Cantai. Unless it is something easily overlooked I’m wondering if it showed up?
Apparently if you don’t enable remote control prior to loading the Cantai app the notification/connection doesn’t happen. I wonder if that would be worth adding to the Cantai playback Readme pdf file? I would have never figured that out.
As a followup once I enabled remote control all the other problems I had went away. I think it is required that remote control be turned on for Cantai to work without causing Dorico to freeze.