Show Cue System

Hi Mike. I'm currently half way through a 6 week run of panto at the Theatre Royal Bath, and as sound designer I have chosen to use the excellent SCS. I'm getting a very odd problem though! When I boot up the computer and start running the show, all works well until I get to one particular cue...which simply plays a piece of music. The next cue is to fade out the music. When I activate the fade out music cue...the music doesn't fade! The display shows that it is stopping...and then the music just abruptly stops at the end of the programmed fade out time, and moves on ready for the next cue..as expected! The rest of the show runs well (except one other cue that has one sound effect playing, and the next cue stops the first sound effect to replace it with another...in this instance, occasionally there is a gap between the two..but most of the time there isn't!!). Anyway, back to the original problem. If I then go back after the show has finished and re check the fade problem...the problem doesn't happen!! Any ideas??
Hope you've had a good Christmas, and all the best for 2008.

Nigel

Nigel,

• Can you email me your cue file (the .scs file) and tell me the cues involved (ie the audio file cue and the fade cue)?
• Which version of SCS are you using?
• What sound card/device?
• What spec computer (memory size, processor speed, etc) and Windows version?
• Have you disabled your virus checker, etc?

Just had a thought: try reducing the number of files pre-opened by SCS. Go to the menu item View / Options, and this field is on the first tab. The default is 15 but you could reduce this to, say, 5. See the Help for more info.

The reason for this suggestion is that what may be happening is that when you activate the fade cue, SCS is getting tied up pre-opening a later cue, which may be either a lengthy file (especially if it's an MP3 file), or possibly opening a playlist with many files. By reducing the number of files pre-opened there is less likelihood that the fade cue will be affected.

Hi Mike

Just got back home from todays shows. I tried your idea of reducing the amount of files opened to 5 and it seems to have done the trick. Many thanks. I'll keep an eye/ear on it, but hopefully it's now sorted. Cheers!

Mike,

I have a similar problem with gaps between cues. I thought it was maybe simply the processing speed of my computer but maybe not. I have several cues that play in rapid sucession. The actor is playing and rewinding a tape and playing it again and again. The tape has two cues one for music and one for voice and then I have very short rewind times between them. I had to resort to making several copies of the original file so that it was not resetting the file in the 2-4 seconds between playings. This seems to have helped slightly but I still have some small gaps. Would reducing the number of file ready have a positive or negative effect for me given that so many file are used so rapidly. The whole cue is only like a minute and I use about 20 files. Thankfully the gaps seem to be after the rewind so I can attribute the gap to pushing play and waiting for tape to start. Any advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

And BTW I have noticed that the gaps tend to get longer at the end of the series. First 3 or so are fine with no gap and the gap for the last 3 tends to increase as it progresses.

Kevin,

Can you email me your cue file?