Show Cue System

Hi all

today i encountered a problem i haven't had before with SCS (i've been running V 10.4.1 on tour for nearly 18 months) when i would right click to activate the next cue (fade out current cue and play next) the first cue would fade, but the second wouldn't play. on the main screen the current cue colour was a yellow colour (when it should be blue) and it said it was "ready" i then clicked on the cue, it loaded, i right clicked and it played as normal. however, this same event happened for the next 4 or so cues. then it sorted itself out and the next 200 odd were fine. this hasn't happened to me before and i've done a brief search for the issue on the forum, but i've got another show and another 700 punters in 2 hours.

any help would be greatly appreciated.


Chris.

Was this a 'one-off' problem, Chris? It seems similar to the issue raised in this forum topic, which has not re-occurred.

it sounds similar, i was a little stressed out at the time. but the description of having to reload each file is the same.
it has happened to me before, but only one cue in any instance. and never the same one (to my knowledge.... i immediately try to rectify the problem of course, and then later forget which cue it happened in), in this instance i felt compelled to ask about it as it happened for several cues one after another.

do you think a software upgrade may fix this issue? i also run a lighting fx program on the same laptop, but it's pretty low consumption. and the laptop is well spec'd... i restart both programs before each show, as a superstitious "clean out the bugs a-la-windows" effort, if that means anything.


Thanks.

Chris.

There's a possibility of this happening if SCS still has a cue state set to 'Playing' or 'Fading Out' even though the cue has stopped playing. If this is the case, the most likely cause is an MP3 file where the estimated length of the file is slightly out. This can happen with MP3 files. Is this a possible reason, eg do you have MP3 files in your production?

Hi Mike/Chris

This is the same problem I encountered some time ago and I discovered that with an MP3 file if you made and edit (I was using Adobe Audition) on the same machine and shortened it then just saved the file rather that creating a new version when you next played the file in SCS it seemed that SCS would keep the fading file active and not allow the next cue to fire.
The only solution was to scrap the SCS cue and make a new one with the MP3 file that had been edited and then it worked fine.
It seemed as though SCS could not distinguish that the file had changed lengh.
Don't know if this helps at all.

Peter

SCS determines the length/playtime of the file when the cue is created, if you then edit the file and use the same file name, SCS does not know it has been altered and assumes the same time parameters.
Also, slightly off topic, If you edit an MP3 within Audition/Audacity etc and then save it out as an MP3, you lose quality as the editing software converts it to wav to carry out the edit then compresses it back to MP3 when you save it out.
If the master file is an MP3 and you need to edit it, save it out as a wav. Wav files are also more accurate in determining run times than MP3.
In Mp3 files, it is difficult to determine run time by file length as it depend on the level of compression (bitrate) even worse if you use VB0.

If you convert your MP3 to wav before you put them into SCS, all your problems go away!! (apart from my first paragraph, that still applies)

HTH (Mike will confirm if I have described the operation of SCS correctly )

Hmm. I'll check out the scenario of editing or shortening a file, but what's been described should have been detected when the cue file was opened.

SCS keeps various properties for each audio file in the <Files> section of the cue file, but when a cue file is opened SCS performs a quick check of each audio file to make sure the saved properties are still valid. SCS checks the 'date modified' (which includes time) and the 'size' (in bytes). If either of these properties do not match the corresponding entries in the <Files> section then all the saved properties for that audio file are discarded and re-obtained by examining or processing the current audio file.

I'll run some tests on changing the length of an MP3 file.