Hi! I’d like to bring to your attention a bug I just encountered while using Cantai. I needed to increase the pre-roll before flow by 1 second to get a better sound for an initial arpeggio in the audio export, and after increasing the pre-roll, I noticed that Cantai no longer played the vocal notes in sync with the rest of the other instruments; it starts playing 1 second later (the same duration as the pre-roll), but from a completely different point in the score than where it should be playing.
I tried creating a new project (this is an old project created with version 6.2.10 that I opened with version 6.2.20) and encountered the same problem: I wrote 4 measures for voices only, increased the pre-roll to 1 second, and after hitting play, Cantai didn’t even play the notes.
I don’t know if this is a Dorico or a Cantai issue, but just to be thorough, I’m reporting the problem here as well.
Yes, that is certainly an issue. It almost caused me to request a refund from Cantai. Apparently, I had changed that at some point along the way and did not recall doing so. Everything that I tried to render with Cantai basically became cacophony. I set it to zero and Cantai rendered easily.
It may well be something you just have to get used to which has been documented over and over again. SynthesiserV is exactly the same. Basically the rules are no pre-roll and it’s strongly advised (particularly with SynthV) not to start vocal playback on the first beat of the first bar. On the other hand as Cantai is integrated directly into Dorico rather than relying on how MusicXML works, it might be fixable. But i hardly see it as a deal-breaker myself – there are far more pressing concerns.
It’s possible to add a bar at the beginning of the piece for instance if there is something which otherwise does not play back correctly (if necessary having two versions of the score but as you’ll probably need to change the lyrics with Cantai, that will need to be done anyway)
by the way Richard has just posted on the Discord forum: If any of you are having issues, where cantaI is silent when you play back, double check your pre-roll setting. Anything non-zero is causing problems. We’re working on it
The key is the final sentence – maybe it won’t be too long until you can in fact use a pre-roll with Cantai.