Auto ducking of a playing cue

[d_korman]

In every show I do, I have a need to make announcements whilst music is playing. It would be great to have a feature that enabled me to duck and restore a playing cue when another cue is played, with the level returning when that second cue ends.

I'd see it a an added feature of Audio File cues : Cue to duck, attenuation (dB) and fade time (s) , which could be same for down and up, or separate. Might also be good to have pre-delay and post-delay, ie when the audio cue with the announcement is fired, it ducks the target cue to the specified level before starting the playback. At the end it would wait before restoring the level of the target cue.

Thanks,
Dave

[Mike Daniell]

On the show I did most recently I had two pre-show announcements, and each of them I set up as hotkey cues containing three sub-cues. The first sub-cue was a level-change to drop the level of the pre-show playlist; the second sub-cue was an audio file of the announcement; and the third sub-cue was level-change to raise the level of the pre-show playlist. Both of the level-change sub-cues had a 2-second duration. For these announcements I decided to drop the pre-show playlist level to -INF as I found that was better than having the pre-show music continuing to play, even at a much lower level.

Is that a possible solution for your requirements?

[d_korman]

That's pretty much how I do it now, only I put the cues into the normal stack, rather than use hotkeys - sometimes whoever is operating lights also does sound but they are not familiar with SCS so needs to be nearly foolproof - just hit the "go" button as they do with the lighting cues.

We normally have 4 announcements - pre-show, start interval, end interval, end show, so that is quite a few extra cues to program doing it as above.
Ducking capability would make this easier to program.

Also - MultiPlay is under active development again and it's something being requested/discussed there, also in relation to a live input triggering the level reduction as in a PA amplifier with priority inputs.

Thanks

Dave