Unable to prevent 'Double Go' when using MIDI

[Paul Perry]

Hello Qlab Community,

I am currently mixing a very exciting new musical in Chicago. The show has backing tracks for most songs that fill in certain instruments to compensate for our small band, and to achieve certain effects that would be impractical to do live. 

Because the backing tracks are musically motivated, they are triggered by the conductor through a foot pedal. Unfortunately, because it’s a very complicated show and everyone is human, the conductor has had a few ‘double GO’s’. Normally a very easy problem to fix, you just go to the Qlab preferences and increase the minimum amount of time between each GO. This is where I encountered a problem.

I increased the minimum amount of time between each GO to 1.5 seconds. I tested it at the keyboard at FOH, it worked like it should. I then tested it using the foot pedal in the pit, and I had time same problem. I looked at the Qlab manual, and it said the minimum amount of time between each GO includes incoming MIDI controls, not just pressing Go with a spacebar or mouse.

The conductor’s foot pedal sends the MIDI message to a MIDI Solutions F8 at FOH, where the signal splits to two M-Audio ProFire 2626 interfaces which then send their respective messages to two Mac Mini’s used for primary and backup cues, both of which are running Qlab 3.

I’m stumped. Can anyone offer advice? We’re about to close, so it’s not urgent, just an interesting sound puzzle.

Thank you,

Paul

[Rich Walsh]

I think it works fine: but are you sure you're using the workspace MIDI controls to trigger and not the MIDI Trigger on a cue / cuelist? Cue triggers are not affected by the double GO protection.

If you are using something other than the workspace triggers then a trick is to trigger a Start Cue with a non-zero post-wait rather than the cue itself.

Rich

[fishmonkey]

the go protection definitely works for me using a MIDI controller mapped to the main workspace go command...

[sosmarci]

Another solution can be that you keep all your cues disarmed, and use an arm cue that runs automatically at the end of the previous track. This can perhaps buy you some time to set the "cursor" to the desired cue that should run next.

Marci