Sound advice needed

[Zimsquid]

From my experience, we have SCS as our venues default playback. This works well and, as others have said is easy to use and quick to set up simple playback cues.

We also have done some very complex sound scapes on it, which from my understanding as I don’t use Qlab, Qlab would have been either far too expensive or may not have coped as well - as said - I have no experience of it and this is from talking to folk who have had experience.

We also have various companies coming in wanting to use their own method of playback for tracks and that is perfectly fine by us IF THEY operate. If they want us to operate, we will take the time to transfer to our PC SCS.

I will not operate a visiting companies show on their system due to the fact that I do not know it, use it or had any experience on it.

We will normally know 6 weeks before hand what the playback situation will be as we have a tech meeting with the company so we can plan and assist them as much as we can, it will be at this point that we discuss with them the benefits of using our system to their iTunes or Windows Media, if they are insisting on using their method, then we will tell them they will need to find an operator to do the playback side, that way we cannot be held responsible for any failed cues or computer errors.

If the visiting company want to use their own kit - it’s in their hands, same with operators, if they want to bring in their own mixing desk, I’ll happily move mine out of the way for them.

It’s all down to horses for courses. We have on the very odd occasion, stripped out our sound rig for the VC to bring their own kit in - but, it was a very odd occasion and it was a 3 month run of their show, so it made sense.

[Heptagon]

Thanks again for the advice. I discussed with our tech-artists, and bought an SCS license.

 

 

 

 

[Heptagon]

Thanks again for the advice. I discussed with our tech-artists, and bought an SCS license.

 

 

 

 

 

But now there is an added complication - the theatre we are using has a Yamaha QL5 mixing console (heavy overkill for the size of theatre, but there it is).

 

Now I am being told that it can run all the sound FX we need from the thumb drive.

 

Looking at the manual this doesn't seem likely, as it seems to be only capable of playing one file at a time.

 

Has anyone tried to run plays with any level of complexity on a mixer like this? (without SCS, Qlab or any similar software).

[alistermorton]

Page 43 of the manual mentions playing back a single mp3 file. No mention of playing multiple files simultaneously, other file formats, panning/fading during playback etc, all things you want a sound cue system to do on cue every performance. I don't know the desk, but at that level it looks like a glorified media player. I don't know the QL5, of course, so I could be completely wrong. Whoever made the suggestion should be able to demonstrate how to do this (with remote control, possibly).

[simontl]

For our theatre the plus with SCS and PCs is that old laptops (donated!) are easy to loan out to the designers who need one. We then load the shows into our fixed PCs.

 

A tip for SCS users... If you build the show on a laptop with just one pair of outputs but your theatre PC has sound card with four pairs, say, duplicate the laptop devices in SCS - upstage, downstage, front auditorium and rear auditorium in our case. Then when you copy the show in, all the settings match.