Show Cue System

Here's the situation, and what I think I need:
We spend 4 weeks in the Spring putting on a series of dance recitals for different dance studios.
Each studio arrives with edited music tracks on CD's....sometimes burned in show order, sometimes the show is spread out over multiple disks.
We spend a couple of days rehearsing the individual dances, spending 10 to 30 minutes each spacing, lighting and cueing up to 100 dances per studio.

Each studio then has several performances consisting of different combinations of the individual dances.

We pull off this logistical nightmare by treating each dance as a separate entity, with a lighting blackout after EVERY dance.
We have learned to base all cues on the time REMAINING in the music track.....we always know how many seconds there are until the blackout at the end of the dance, and we give the people doing the fly moves and set changes a "wake-up" call over the headset at 30 seconds remaining.

Currently we use 2 CD players at the sound board (at the back of the house), with a video camera pointed at the displays. This is functional, as long as a choreographer doesn't try to give the sound board operator notes and stand in the way of the video camera!

The stage manager (on stage) watches a video monitor, and calls cues (and the 30 second wake-up) over the headsets to the rest of the crew.

What I would like to do is replace the CD players with a rock-solid program that can access 2 (or more) cd-drives with separate controls for each drive, and a floating window with a display of the time remaining in the currently playing music track. We would move this to a secondary monitor output by itself and distribute it to the stage manager. An incredible bonus would be a "chime" that played on a separate audio channel that we could set at 30 seconds remaining, that we would feed into the headset system. (The stage manager occasionally forgets to call the "wake-up" call)

I know, this is basically a different program from SCS entirely, but SCS is the closest program I have found to accomplishing what we want.
Thanks
Mike

Hallo Mike,

I think that SCS is the right thing for You.
At first, rip all necessary audio tracks to Your harddisk to separate folders. A good software to do this is EAC, which can also handle CDs in bad condition.
Now set up a cue file and add all tracks in the right order. No need to have each track more than once at the disk. For the wake-up call, add an autostart cue starting 30s before end of the prvious cue, which can contain a chime or an announcement, and send this audio to a separate audio output feeding the intercom.
If necessary, You can set up a separate cue file for each performance. There is a function to create "production folder" within the editor, which copies all audio files and a modified cue file to this folder, so that a complete production can be easily moved to an other computer.
You can easily recall cue files via favorites.

HTH Jörg

Hi Mike!

Jörg already pointed out some ways to solve your problems with scs.
You can setup SCS to have a "big" time display which pops up at a given time before end (e.g. 30 sec, or display the whole time of a cue counting down or up).
In combination with the "chime" sound 30 sec before end on a separate output it should solve your stagemenager issues.....
To 'split' the view of the elapsed/remain time on our theatre to the stage manager we use a vnc server (set to mode "block all remote inputs") on the playback machine and an vnc viewer on a laptop placed by the stage manager connected by 100mbit ethernet. So he can view the big time display and the running cue. I didn't checked it not yet with SCS but we run this setup with another playback program every dance show fed by audio playback.


Regards,

Christian

Thank you for the suggestions.
The big problem with dealing with choreographers is that they are not organized....we may receive CD's up to and after their scheduled rehearsal time....there is no time for ripping the music tracks....just watching the CD load in a regular CD player can seem like an eternity, when 100 people are waiting.

Ah choreographers! Some of thes guys fooled me during our opening show for the 2011/12 season
Perhaps it will help if the 100 people can see the reason for the unwanted break