Global volume control via midi device

[Ron Peer]

Hi there,

Was trying to find some info regarding the above with no success.

I'm looking for a way to control master volume with midi knob or fader, basicly to eliminate the need to bother sound tech for each VO decrease of fine volume adjustments.

I operated a corporate event the other day and the director of the show put it out in a very straight forward way: 'I really don't trust sound guys'.

any thoughts?

[Rich Walsh]

I think I must be missing something here: you’re looking for a device with a fader that can sit between QLab’s outputs and the amplifiers that allows you to, er, mix the sound in realtime? I don’t know if anyone’s ever invented such a mixing, erm, "console"?

What exactly are you trying to control – ie: what do you mean by “master volume”? Each cue has a master slider, each cue list can be targeted by a fade that affects the volume of all loaded or running cues, each audio patch has a master slider for Device Output. Your interface may have MIDI control, eg: RME?

There’s a whole thread about this here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qlab/yQeHUCjII_w/discussion. You can stick an AU plug-in across the outputs and use OSC. Probably MIDI too if you pick the right plug-in.

It all depends what you’re trying to achieve.

Rich

[Andy Lang]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 4:42 PM Ron Peer <Ro...@hakolsound.co.il> wrote:

I operated a corporate event the other day and the director of the show put it out in a very straight forward way: 'I really don't trust sound guys'.

(N.B. - What follows is personal opinion, and not necessarily the opinion of anybody else at Figure 53, or the company itself.)

My solution for this? Stop working for that director. 

Snark aside, this specific situation sounds like it's not a technical problem, it's a personnel problem. As such, it should be used to educate or solve the actual problem, rather than indulge an unhealthy attitude. 

Having been in that exact situation, I've very clearly and politely stated that they need to either learn to trust the people they hired to do the job they're being paid to do, or start hiring people to do that job who they do trust. 

-Andy

[Bruno Carneiro]

+1

[Andy James]

Not for the same scenario, but actually it would be great to have some midi control over a selected cues master level. This would speed up rehearsal sessions to set levels on the fly audio cues.

Andy

[micpool]

Surely a set of keyboard shortcuts that actually set the levels you want on selected cues is far more useful ,as you only have to change the level once  and are constantly refining levels as you go. You can make your own with some cues with hotkey triggers.

Either an OSC cue

/cue/selected/level/0/0/- 3

Just change the last bit of the message to whatever you want the level for that hotkey to be. I use  Keys 1 to 5 and Shift 1 to 5 for + and - 1 to 5 dB

or Rich Walsh's script version:

set userBump to 2.5 repeat with eachCue in (selected of front workspace as list) try set currentLevel to eachCue getLevel row 0 column 0 eachCue setLevel row 0 column 0 db (currentLevel + userBump) end try end repeat

If you really want  a knob then this may help: 

https://qlabcookbook.com/1986/01/28/encoder-envy/

In rehearsal it is often useful to be able to play cues at a different level. For instance if you have a complicated battle sequence with lots of 115dB explosions, it is really antisocial and probably injurious to play them at that level for an entire 4 hour  rehearsal. There are many ways of spending loads of money on plugins that can be OSC controlled, custom MIDI faders etc, but generally a cheap mixer (there are tons on amazon for less than $50) is the simplest and effective means of achieving this.

Mic