AVD Multiplay

[kitlane]

Is the hard drive going to sleep and taking a few seconds to wake up?

[timtheenchanteruk]

if it is, its something inside win7 that cant be turned off, all the power save features I knew of, and found a few more on tinternet are turned off, HDD always on, no sleep/hibernate/screen off, all USB powersaves off.

network adaptors are disabled in "live" mode.

The other thing is the delay is not the same, like I said its from less than half a second to 6 seconds, a hdd delay is usually more or less the same as the drive spins up.

[david.elsbury]

What Tim said. All options on my system are set to encourage best performance.

 

I'm now running the show with Multiplay on my XP netbook triggering Lightfactory on the W7 laptop. Waste of a perfectly good laptop... ;)

I'm still pre-loading all the cues I can as I'm a little paranoid, but happy to report that the preview and opening night went flawlessly.

 

Tim, you mentioned that running a cue caused MP to "wake up", is this any cue (ie, can I run a memo cue) or does it have to be an audio cue?

 

+1 on the "delay not consistent" also :)

 

Will try and do more testing next week, have been moving house and so life is hectic right now! :)

 

Cheers

David

[calvintanhanjin]

hi all,

 

I'm a new user to Multiplay and im experiencing some problems inserting sound cues.

 

I keep getting the Warning message "One or more tracks could not be added."

 

they're all .mp3 files and I checked with other similar type files - seems to work just fine. just these particular sound cues for my upcoming theatre production.

 

any ideas what could have happened or suggestions to try out? I've been searching for similar problems but to no avail.

 

cheers!

 

Calvin

[Bobbsy]

David Duffy has been busy with real life projects for a while and doesn't visit often for the time being.

 

The first thing I'd check is to see if there's anything different about the MP3 files that won't load: maybe variable bit rate instead of constant bit rate? Or including some extra metadata, DRM controls or something? Do the same files work with the various codecs on your machine outside of Multiplay?

 

FYI, I'm only guessing here--I only ever use wave files I've created myself, not MP3 stuff so I have no personal experience. The one time I got a similar error message was when I accidentally specified a wave file that was 32 bit floating point rather than my usual "CD quality" versions.

[timtheenchanteruk]

 

Tim, you mentioned that running a cue caused MP to "wake up", is this any cue (ie, can I run a memo cue) or does it have to be an audio cue?

 

 

 

Apologies for the delay in replying, it seems to have to be an audio cue.

I've done a dance show with no problems of delays, tracks are one after another.

The other show I did, I made a 2 second silent cue, call it a "standby" cue if you will, triggering this at "standby" seemed to stop any noticable delay.

After looking at it, it is multiplay that is casuing the delay, when the "GO" button is pressed, it does not react immediately, but rather after the inconsistant delay, ie when "Go" registers as being pressed, the cue plays immediately.

 

With regard to one or more tracks cannot be added, I have found these to usually be variable bitrate tracks, I usually run them through WinFF to solve it, word of warning too, if using Win7, convert them to .wav, MP3 sounds crap on win 7 for whatever reason.

[oakeedokee]

Just had an email from the author, David Duffy saying he will look into my request to re-instate drag and drop for audio files in the next version.

Meanwhile an earlier version that supports drag and drop albeit without the bells and whistles of the current version can be found here:

http://www.users.on.net/~avd/multiplay/Multiplay2509.zip

[spartacus]

Hello, does anyone know what programming language Multiplay is written in? I remember reading it on this forum, perhaps this thread, but the search function has not helped me. Thank you :)

[Gerry]

Why don't you contact the author, david@audiovisualdevices.com.au, I think he might know.

Cheers

Gerry

[gafferted]

I added the two new Advance Actions (Fade Advance and Fade Play) properly to MultiPlay this morning.

 

They seem to work as expected when the cue performs a fade as a result of the Fade Out and End Fade being set.

 

I guess they also need to be able to activate when the cue is faded as a result of a Fade Cue command?

 

Obviously performing a Fade All should not activate the new functions.

 

Hiya,

 

I've been trying to get this to do a crossfade by "end play" ing a following cue. This does work, but the "end advance" still seems to be lurking in the background.

 

I'll try to explain what happens...

 

Manually play cue 1 in the sequence. Cue 2 auto fires at the start of the end fade on cue 1. All good so far. the progress bar properly "start advances" to the third cue in the sequence. However, once the fade on the first cue completes, the progress bar reverts to back to cue 2.

 

Am I making sense? Am I doing something wrong?

 

I've got round it by setting cue 1 to "start play" a <Wait> cue which then fires the second audio cue in the sequence.

 

This is on Win7 64bit if that's relevent.

 

Eddie

[DrummerJonny]

 

 

Hiya,

 

(Quote Removed)

 

Eddie

 

Hey Eddie.

 

Just had a quick play around, and depending on how your show is setup / needs to run, you can get round this by setting cue 2 in the sequence to "end advance".

 

This works, assuming that cue 2 plays for longer than the fadeout on cue 1, and that you don't need to trigger cue 3 before the end of cue 2.

 

Otherwise, I think your wait workaround may be the solution.

[gafferted]

Thanks for that Jonny - I hadn't thought of it.

 

What I'm trying to achieve is a car pulling up, ticking over for an indeterminate time before the engine turning off on cue.

 

What I've ended up with is the pulling up as cue 1 (audio cue) which "start plays" a wait cue(2) to fire the tickover loop (cue 3, audio) once the car has stopped. The next cue(4) is a control cue which fades out the tickover loop and "start Plays" the last audio cue (5), the engine stop.

 

5 cues in all but you only press the go button twice

 

As you say, your suggestion doesn't work in all cases, and in fact doesn't in this one as the second bit of audio is an infinite loop so the "after" event never happens.

[DrummerJonny]

Hmm, I see what you mean.

 

That does seem to be an interesting quirk, and seems to me that the "Fade Advance" and "Fade Play" Commands also execute an "End Advance" Command when the track ends.

 

I think your workaround is the way I would go. I can't improve on that.

[timtheenchanteruk]

Can't visualise it, and don't have MP here to play with, but it sounds like one of the "targets" is set wrong somewhere pretty sure I had something similar, and that's what fixed it..

[gafferted]

I've recently had trouble with the delayed firing of cues. It was after I'd archived a production to a USB stick in order to transfer it from my home PC (Vista) to a laptop (Win 7) in the theatre. One or two of the cues resolutely took a second or two to play. I found that by by editing the files in Cool Edit, removing a few milliseconds of silence from the end seemed to make them play on the button.

 

Make what you will of that!