Cantabile Development Blog

New Bypass Functionality

So far the beta seems to be going OK, a few crash/hang reports and some other minor problems but not too bad for a first release.

Today, I completed the new bypass functionality (which if you have tried in the beta will have given an annoying "not implemented" message box). Previously, bypass used to soft mute the plugin and then completely suspend it from processing. Often this is desirable as it saves CPU load however it has the downside of truncating still sounding instruments and delayed audio effects.

So now there's two buttons on each plugin slot - bypass and suspend. Suspend does what the old bypass button does. The new bypass button is less aggressive:

• The plugin continues to process.
• Most incoming MIDI events are bypassed to the next plugin. The exception is note off events for any notes that have been previously sent to the plugin and some controller events (sustain pedal for example) which are still sent to the bypassed plugin - to avoid stuck notes.
• Incoming audio is soft ramped away from the plugin are routed directly to the slots output. It also bypasses the dry mix level setting.
• Audio generated by the plugin is mixed in as per normal (using the wet mix level).

In other words, all the plugin's inputs are disconnected, but it's outputs stay connected.

Advantages of this approach include: * Sounding notes and lingering audio effects aren't truncated. * Resuming a plugin from this state is very fast as it's not really suspended at all. * More constant processing load.

Of course in Performer this is all tied in with sub-sessions.

This will all be in the next build (coming soon). In the mean time, I'm off to fix some bugs...

Posted on November 13, 2008

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