Has Anyone Else Tried To Install Captain Chords?

[Garrick Peterson]

Captain Chords is a VST that creates chord progressions, bass lines and arps that can be adapted to melodies within a DAW and is opened just like any VST instrument. The website doesn't say specifically that they support Cakewalk. I tried to install the Captain Chords VST and load it in Cakewalk, and the only result was that my Melodyne 4, which wasn't even open at the time, malfunctioned and I was given an error message that advised me to disable Melodyne. In the process of trying to have Cakewalk scan for new VSTs, I got these error messages:

"IDS_TITLE_WARN_MIDI_PORTS not found in text source file! (now that's exciting. It even has an exclamation mark)

"Cannot open ARX MIDI ports. Please ensure that ARX is connected and that the MIDI ports are not selected in the host." (I don't know what ARX is, and I don't know how to do anything about MIDI ports selected in the host, whatever that is)

"MIDI devices are not set up properly. Make sure the settings in the Set Up MIDI Devices dialog box are correct" (I plugged in my MIDI keyboard and restarted. Then the MIDI keyboard showed up on the dialog box, and I checked it, and it worked. But I still can't find Captain Chords, which is supposed to be a MIDI creating VST)

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Neil Cummins]

Hi Garrick,

                            I think I put a similar post on here a couple of months back but with no reply.I vaguely remember that the manufacturer's website doesn't specifically state compatibility with CbB,but may suggest to try it.

Evidently your experience suggests not as yet,maybe worth contacting them to see if compatibility with CbB is planned?

Interested to hear if you have anything back from them,or manage to get it to work,as it's a VST I'd like to try myself.

Regards

Neil.

[Matthew Sorrels]

I've had it for a while now and I've not had any problems with it but I've mostly been using Cubase 9 and 10, only rarely CbB these days.  I just tried it and it seemed to work.  I only did the Captain Chords plugin itself, I didn't try adding the others and seeing if the communication between them would work.  What your describing sounds like something unrelated to Captain Chords since the error happened while you were scanning for VSTs, which most likely means it was some other plugin and not Captain Chords.

[Matthew Sorrels]

Searching for "ARX MIDI" turns this up:

https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/20090609/ARX-MIDI-Port-Error-upon-inserting-ARX-Editor

Do you have a Roland V-Studio?

Edited April 15, 2019 by Matthew Sorrels

[Garrick Peterson]

No I don't have Roland V Studio. The problem is clear to me. Cakewalk is not a major player anymore. Compatibility to their software is not a priority for developers.

[Matthew Sorrels]

Captain Chords and Melodyne 4 Studio work for me in the most recent CbB.   The errors your reporting definitely aren't inside any of the Captain Chord binaries.  You might want to search your system and see if you have a Fantom VS.dll or ARX.DLL vst.   Not sure why you'd have those but those error message are definitely related to the Roland VS-700 and/or Roland Fantom VS ARX editor.  Might be part of something else you installed (Roland Cloud maybe)?

Software developers rarely support any DAWs directly.  It's not just Cakewalk.  Captain Chords does work in Cubase but it's window resize option doesn't (resize does work in CbB).  I sent them a note about it and the only response was they forwarded my message to their development team.  So they aren't even really supporting Cubase (it's still broken 6 months and several updates later) and works even less in REAPER.  I'm not sure there is a DAW you can choose that won't have some issues with some products.