Live Inputs trough SCS

[Nick]

Hi Mike,

Another suggestion for your long-term planning (and forgive me if I have raised this before).

It would be great if there was a cue type that looked like an Audio cue, but simply routed the signal from one of the inputs on the attached sound card / interface to SCS outputs using the same fader / addressing system as usual (and more specifically, being able to be acted on by subsequent Fade cues - enabling such an input to be panned around a set of speakers). The input would stay active till a Stop cue targetting that "Live" cue was fired.

We have several potential shows we could transfer to SCS from other systems that mainly distribute recorded audio (such as sound effects), but they have one or two live inputs (a voice or an instrument) that need to get panned around the room as well.

Obviously this raises the bane of all DAW programmers - latency (processing delay) between input and output, and yes that is a consideration, but whatever the latency, it would be useful, given that such inputs are often an Actor offstage interacting with those onstage, who can not be heard live.
Cheers,
nick

[Ian Beeby]

I agree, this would be useful, and with fast sound cards, latency should not be too much of a problem.
However! If you are wanting to switch microphones on and off in time with specific pieces of music (as was our requirement) which is particularly important with radio mics (see recent news stories !!!!!) then one way is to use a relay unit driven off midi, arranged to 'mute' the mics until required. it is built into the relevant cues but can also be incorporated as a hot key for level testing with the PFL switches.
We use this method for control of our stage monitoring microphones and it is a good (if rather pricey) option. The relay we use is by MIDI Solutions in Canada. Nicely built and very reliable, but quite expensive!

[lebem]

If you have a digital board (with appropriate midi implimentation), you could use SCS's midi functionality to send instructions to your console for purposes of both re-routing live sound, or simple mute/unmute (note on/note off).

For example: most faders, pan controls, etc... can be addressed on the Yamaha digital boards as CC midi messages; alternatively the changes can be programmed as scenes on the board, and a midi program change message sent to recall the correct scene on the board.