Here's an interesting one - QLab as a sting machine without repeating a sting.

[Rory Maguire]

Hello everyone!

I had a bit of a head scratch moment the other day and just wanted to see what you guys and girls thought of it.

The situation is one I'm sure we've all come across. Comedy/Awards show, lots of walk up stings of different genres to be played at random.

I've currently got "Play Random Child" groups for each genre of sting. Set to be triggered via MIDI hot keys from the console.

The issue I'm working with is how to ensure you don't play the same sting twice.

I'm assuming the result will be some kind of script to disarm once a cue has fired, and then another to prevent a disarmed cue from firing and resulting in silence.

Has anyone come across this before, or have any pointers on how best to achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

-Rory Maguire

[micpool]

This thread

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qlab/M0zlgWt2Ots/discussion

Mic

[Rory Maguire]

Hi Mic,

I knew this would exist somewhere already!

Thanks again, will go from there!

-Rory

[MattM]

This is pretty crude, and not exactly on point, but I did write up how I addressed a similar problem -- creating a "non repeating jukebox" that will allow you to "go to commercial" during a show without ever hearing the same song twice:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!searchin/qlab/MattM/qlab/kgWgl7B8H2o

Again, it's not exactly what you're looking for, and admittedly, it's pretty crude, but it might give you some ideas on how to address the non-repeating issue. In my case, the player sets the "flagged" status of each cue as it's played, and uses that info to find its place in the list of songs the next time the jukebox is triggered, and then just proceed linearly from there until the jukebox is stopped. That's not what you're looking to do, but it would be very straightforward to write a script that simply chose a random cue from the sting machine's workspace, then checked to see if that cue was flagged. If it is, it picks again. If it isn't, it plays it, setting the "flagged"...er...flag, to "true" once the sting is finished.

Hope that's helpful!
Matt