New Feature - Faded Pause

[Dan]

Hi, Mike!

I just did a Murder Mystery Dinner fundraiser for our theatre group, and I had several hours of background music I ran during the evening (BTW, I'm really looking forward to the Playlist cue type in 9!)

During the evening, the Master of Ceremonies would frequently need to make announcements, at which time I would need to manually fade down the background music, and then click the pause button for the running music. And of course, when he was done speaking, I would then need to unpause the cue, and then manually fade the volume back up. After doing this many, many times over the course of the evening, and sometimes fading up first and then unpausing (Doh!)...

I would like to suggest that a "Pause Fade Time" option be added to a cue's edit screen, similar, but separate from the Fade In/Out Times that are already on the screen. Today when the Pause button is clicked for a running cue, it instantly halts the cue. For certain situations, like background music, with one or more potential interruptions, after which I would want to resume the previously playin cue, it would be nice to automatically fadedown to Pause, and then automatically fade back up from Pause.

I even considered that perhaps a Global Fade Hotkey would be a more appropriate solution. That is, define a special key (sort of like the ESC key is for stopping everything), that could be a timed Fade To/From Pause toggle. In any case, I would like to be able to define how long the Fade Up/Down was, regardless of whether the Fade Time was defined per cue, or as a global.

Maybe the Forum could toss out their opinions on if this would be useful, and their thoughts on what kind of implementation would be most beneficial.

Thanks for all you do Mike!

DV

[Mike Daniell]

That's a reasonably straight forward feature to implement if we adopt the 'global' approach. The fade-down and fade-up times could be defined in the Options window, and I could also make the Global Fade Hotkey assignable there as well. For example, if you assign the function key F12 as the hotkey then pressing F12 will fade down and then pause the currently playing cue(s), and then when you press F12 again those same cue(s) would be resumed and fade up to their previous levels. Pressing the hotkey the second time would be made to work even if the cues had not reached the paused state, so you could cancel the effect of pressing the hotkey the first time. We'll probably need to be able to cancel the second one as well (ie the fade-up) if your MC remembers something else he/she meant to say, after you've started the fade-up.

I'll add this to my list of Feature Requests.

Regards,
Mike

[Dan]

That would be great, Mike! A global solution would be just fine.

Obviously, you've been there for live announcements too, because the situation you described (where the MC remembers something he needed to say after I had started the fadeup...) happened several times last night!

Thanks!

[Theatre III Sound]

Mike

Having nothing better to do on a rainy Sunday, I guess, I started looking through this forum from the beginning. I don't think you ever implemented this suggestion, did you? It would be a "nice to have" feature to set a global fade time for pauses and be able to assign a hotkey to it in addition to <ALT> U.

Bruce