Advance Action Usage

[David]

Currently, a cue's Advance Action can have a target of any other cue in the cue list.

I'm guessing that most users probably only ever set the target of the Advance Action to the next cue.

I can see where using the Advance Action to jump back in the cue list is handy if you want a set of cues to loop over and over.

The reason I ask is that I'm looking to change the way the code handles the Advance Action of Start Play to make it more responsive.

The goal is to allow consecutive cues to be started together with zero (or minimal & consistent) delay between them.

So, how do you use the Advance Action in your cues ?

[Brian]

Hi David,

I only ever use the Advance Action to go to the NEXT cue. I think that all one's homework should be done outside MultiPlay. The Cue List should be an ordered Cue List. Likewise people should not expect MultiPlay to perform actions that can easily be done as homework in prgrams such as Audacity, ie getting rid of silences at the beginning and end of cues, Compressing the cue or adding re-verb to it etc, etc.

Cheers

Brian

[Brian Holder]

When I started using Multiplay back in the mist of time, one of the tests that I did was to set 50 Midi cues to "Start Play". I was surprised that the delay to start the final cue was not noticeable. I haven't tried this recently, has anything changed? I frequently stack up to 5 cues with start play and never notice any delay.
Brian

[David]

The delay does some to be an issue on some systems, so I've been working on ways to minimise it and make it consistent.

I've got a pretty fast PC with lots of RAM, but a lot of users have lower powered systems and that may explain the issues some have that I can't replicate.

Today I tested the new code using 10 or so cues with the same audio file and there was almost zero delay. The output was simply louder with more identical cues.

Anyway, I think I have it working now so that you can still have advance action targets that are not the next cue and it will still work with the new faster start play code.

I might release v175 in the next day or so so that people can check out the new features, changes and bug fixes. It may be an idea to not use v175 for production use until it's been tested some more. There are a lot of changes and something may have gotten missed.

[Gorsky]

Hi,

Most of the time I use Start Advance/Play next.

There is few exceptions based on this specific:

In one play there are recorded speech of actors. Lets say there are a couple of recordings in sequence. But there are multiple actors in same role, so cue list looks something like this:

actor 1 recording #1
actor 2 recording #1
actor 3 recording #1
actor 1 recording #2
actor 2 recording #2
actor 3 recording #2
some other action

Then I make it that "actor 1 recording #1" advances not to next que, but to "actor 1 recording #2" and so on to simplify operation and possible errors. All of the "... recording #2" advances to "some other action"

Maby there is a better way, but this is what I come up with.


Some older plays we had, could branch off or have different scenes based on actor availability or variations, so if would be helpful to have the ability to jump around the que list as now. Alternative would be to have multiple productions that are half copies. That would be inconvenient, especially if some changes are made, then you have to go and change all variations you have.

[EdK]

Hi David,

I've never used the Advance function to go forward beyond the next cue.  However, I have used it to go backward in order to loop a group of cues.  But the new Play List function now serves that purpose and at the same time unclutters the Cue List.  I use it primarily for looping pre-show and intermission music.

I have used Start Play to start 2 additional cues to play at the same time and I have needed to sync them. So far the syncing hasn't been an issue as they didn't need to be sync'ed perfectly  except in one instance where I need to sync a video (which had an image of a actor singing) to an audio track playing in another cue.   

Did a show this past summer where I had an 5 minute long audio track playing and during that, I needed to play 2 short video's (with audio and closeups of an actor singing) starting at different timestamps of the audio track.  On my computer, I had no syncing issues however, on the theatre's computer which isn't as high end as mine, it wouldn't sync perfectly each and every time.   

What I ended up doing is mixing the audio from the video's into the full length audio track (creating a new audio file), created a new video file using the new audio track I just created and then inserted the video's into the correct locations and muting their individual audio tracks.  So in the end I simply played the new video file (containing all the audio and the videos) in Multiplay therefore having only one cue active in Multiplay.

I hope I described this properly so it makes sense.

Ed

[jim10705]

I use mostly Start Advance / Next Cue.
However, the last two theater productions used End Play in order to play staggered overlapped audio.  The playing of the cues didn't require precision down to milliseconds.  The theatre is looking into more integration of MultiPlay and its light console for sync'ed cues, so solid and flexible triggering of multiple cues would be good.