Cantabile 3 now supports hot swapping of MIDI devices!
This has been a long time coming, but finally Cantabile monitors for newly added (and dropped) MIDI devices and will automatically reconnect MIDI input and output ports on the fly! No need to restart Cantabile, you don’t event need to restart the audio engine. Just plug and play!
How does this work in practice? Well firstly Cantabile isn’t going to re-connect a MIDI port to a MIDI device that it’s never seen before. But it will handle a scenario like this: Suppose you have a MIDI Input port named “Main Keyboard” and you have two keyboards that might be used for the main keyboard. You can plug them in one at a time (or both at the same time) and configure the MIDI input port to be mapped to both of them.
Now you can load a session, be playing away and unplug one device, plugin in the other and within a second or two the new keyboard should be up and working.
The same thing works for MIDI Output devices. The only catch here is that the target device probably isn’t going to be configured the way you want it — eg: triggers aren’t automatically re-invoked when a new device is plugged in.
I’ve tested this pretty thoroughly with the gear I have here and it seems to work really well. I’d be interested to hear how it works for you in the real world. If you’ve got some feedback, please leave a comment on the associated Trello card.