Show Cue System

Well to start the designer I have worked with in the past introduced me to your software and I must say. This sure beats using a dual cd player. I love the software.

This may have been requested before but I will post this anyway.

Master EQ - I have a dell laptop and the onboard sound card loses a lot of the low end. It would be great to be able to give the sound card a boost with an EQ.

Thanks,
Eric

Thanks for your comments and suggestion, Eric. Yes, the request for EQ has come up before. It won't make the initial release of version 9 but it is on the list! Can you boost the low end on the relevant channels at the sound desk?

The inclusion of EQ (in SCS) is not be the best way to address soundcard shortcomings. Fix the problem at the source. There are inexpensive USB devices that will sound *a lot* better than the Dell laptop built-in audio.

Unless you are talking about a good sounding EQ algorithm more on par with those available on sound editing or DAW apps, AND the ability to apply EQ on a per cue basis, you are much better off applying EQ at the mixer, as suggested. But if you were to pursue that feature, I'd suggest instead the ability to host plugins (DirectX or VST) on a per-cue basis.

that's what I think, anyway...

eduardo

I know that getting an interface would be the real fix. However if a client is paying me with dirt, I cant really afford one. When I want to just quickly drop my laptop into the mix and not deal with many settings this would be really nice. I can always use the console's 3 or 4 band eq, however it would be nice if I could set the level on my laptop once and not have to think about them again in future gigs.

Mike, how many bands of EQ are you planning to have?

Thanks,
Eric

No specific plans, Eric, but I have no intention of implementing a Mickey Mouse system, so you can be sure that when this does come off the drawing board it will have some respectable functionality. This probably means a few parametric EQ controls.

Regards,
Mike

Mike Daniell wrote:No specific plans, Eric, but I have no intention of implementing a Mickey Mouse system, so you can be sure that when this does come off the drawing board it will have some respectable functionality. This probably means a few parametric EQ controls.

Regards,
Mike

Have you considered implementing ReWire? AFAIK Propellerheads offer a free licence to software makers to use ReWire 2 in their products.

http://www.propellerheads.se/technologi ... isplaymain

Thanks for the link. Although I've heard of this software I haven't previously had a look at it. I don't currently know how easy it would be to implement this but I'll look into it in the future. Providing EQ and other effects (delay, etc) is fairly easy anyway as the audio driver I am using provides this functionality. The reason I haven't implemented it yet is that I would need to design the user interface (which takes time) and other enhancements are more in demand.

Mike Daniell wrote: I don't currently know how easy it would be to implement this but I'll look into it in the future.

It will probably be worth the look. If it is implemented in SCS you can get included in the ReWire users list, along with the big names like ProLogic, Steinberg, Ableton etc. (so their users know about you too) I suspect it's an I/O and sync module handling digital audio streams and sync/clock data, but for a requirement to interface with other digital/audio programs it saves re-inventing the wheel each time

Providing EQ and other effects (delay, etc) is fairly easy anyway as the audio driver I am using provides this functionality. The reason I haven't implemented it yet is that I would need to design the user interface (which takes time) and other enhancements are more in demand.

Some of the ReWire progs have their own EQ/FX but with ReWire you can use your preferred EQ/FX even if it's part of another prog. It may be a quicker option when you have other details in SCS to tackle first.

It might be nice, rather than trying to design and implement specific DSP requests, to instead work on support for 3rd party DSP plug-ins like Winamp or Sourceforge open source freeware.
By programing support for a specific family of DSP, rather than building in individual DSP's will give you a wider array of choices and possibilities, and free you up to work on the master program interface.

Mike,

have you made any progress with ASIO driver support - to enable the use of multichannel sound cards that only appear as a singel stereo device with normal WDM (not multichannel) drivers?

And are you looking at supporting the new multichannel WDM drivers, which appear to windows as a single device with multiple channels multiplexed internally

ASIO support is definitely planned but probably post-SCS 9. Can you give me a link to info on the 'new multichannel WDM drivers'?

It's all in the WDM developer documentation on the MS website. I'm no expert WDM, but I think this link might help:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... b3.xml.asp

and specifically here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us ... xaudio.asp

Do you have a specific sound card you want this for? I'm wondering if this is more a feature of the sound card driver than an SCS requirement. For example, my Delta 44 driver 'publishes' it's outputs as stereo pairs. Technically, I would assume that M-Audio could write a WDM driver that would publish it's outputs as a single 4-channel device. If that were the case then the current version of SCS should be able to output to all four channels from a 4-channel WAV, OGG or WMA file.

Mike Daniell wrote:Do you have a specific sound card you want this for? I'm wondering if this is more a feature of the sound card driver than an SCS requirement. For example, my Delta 44 driver 'publishes' it's outputs as stereo pairs. Technically, I would assume that M-Audio could write a WDM driver that would publish it's outputs as a single 4-channel device. If that were the case then the current version of SCS should be able to output to all four channels from a 4-channel WAV, OGG or WMA file.

Probably - but that's not really what is required. What is needed is to be able to output multiple different cues, with different wav files that mioht be mono or stereo, onto a multi-output device that appears to windows as only a single sound device and uses the internal multiplexing. So SCS would have to create the multipexed data stream in real time to feed to the multi-channel driver of the soundcard.

There are many (in fact most) professional sound cards that appear to windows as only a single device, and provide a multi-channel driver. If the software does not have Multichannel WDM or ASIO support, then only the frist two channels are usable with these devices.

From the limited amount of research I have done so far it looks like this can be implemented in SCS. I'll look into the enhancement (amongst other features) after I've got the initial release of version 9 available.