{"id":220,"date":"2009-02-27T20:31:08","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T01:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/?p=220"},"modified":"2023-12-20T16:25:22","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:25:22","slug":"sound-in-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/2009\/02\/27\/sound-in-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound in Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing sound work in theatres since high school, and I&#8217;ve run into some pretty interesting software over the years.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve used audio editing tools like Sound Forge, Audacity, Audition, SoundBooth, etc.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve composed music in Cubase, Sony ACID Pro, FruityLoops, Apple Logic Express.\u00a0 The list goes on.<\/p>\n<p>But once the music is composed, and the sounds are all edited, how do you play them back during a performance?<\/p>\n<p>The <strong>old <\/strong>way was to play them through a CD player; you&#8217;d burn all your sounds and music to disc, and then track through.\u00a0 God help you if you had to do a cross-fade on an actor cue though, because that would mean having <strong>two <\/strong>CD players, cuing them up simultaneously, and doing a manual cross-fade on the mixer.<\/p>\n<p>There are better ways to do this.<\/p>\n<p>In fact (and my boss, UCDP Tech Director Peter Freund would agree with me on this), there seems to be a trend nowadays to put more emphasis in programming and preparation, and to make playback mostly automated.\u00a0 It&#8217;s true for lights (lighting boards are pre-programmed with cues, and then the lighting operator just hits the &#8216;GO&#8217; button to go through each transition), and it&#8217;s now true for sound.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/figure53.com\/qlab\/\">Check out this piece of software. <\/a>It&#8217;s called QLab.\u00a0 And it&#8217;s free!\u00a0 This is what we use at the UCDP.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s a small problem:\u00a0 it&#8217;s only for Macs.\u00a0 Which blows.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, it really blows.\u00a0 As a modern web-developer, I take cross-platform applications for granted.\u00a0 Sure, IE may quirk out, but we can usually work around that (thanks jQuery!\u00a0 Prototype!).\u00a0 QLab, however, is Mac software, and that&#8217;s all she wrote.\u00a0 It&#8217;s really kind of heartbreaking.<\/p>\n<p>If I had the time, and if someone would pay me, I&#8217;d look into writing an open-source cross-platform QLab clone.\u00a0 In Java, maybe.\u00a0 There&#8217;s probably a ton of issues doing cross-platform sound work, but Audacity did it &#8211; why can&#8217;t I?<\/p>\n<p>Just a thought.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and yes, there is a free piece of playback software for Windows called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.audiovisualdevices.com.au\/software\/multiplay\/multiplay.php\">Multiplay<\/a> that&#8217;s alright, but I find QLab a bit more flexible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing sound work in theatres since high school, and I&#8217;ve run into some pretty interesting software over the years.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve used audio editing tools like Sound Forge, Audacity, Audition, SoundBooth, etc.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve composed music in Cubase, Sony ACID Pro, FruityLoops, Apple Logic Express.\u00a0 The list goes on. But once the music is composed, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,115,79,4],"tags":[117,118,116,1215,1208,1204],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-sound","category-technology","category-ucdp","tag-editing","tag-playback","tag-qlab","tag-sound","tag-theater","tag-ucdp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-3y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3260,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions\/3260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}