QLab 5 Fading looping Playlists

[micpool]

Here's another potential pitfall and a solution.

In QLab5 the new playlist group has an option to loop. If you fade a looping playlist group (e.g a relative fade of +30dB) everything happens as expected until the fade completes and then a looping  group will revert to the original levels the cues were set at.

The solution is to use a much longer fade, but only use a portion of the fade curve to go to 100 percent.  In this screenshot, a playlist builds over 20 secs and that level is held for a further 40 secs

The original problem I found this solution for was 22 minutes of preshow music that was in a shuffle loop playlist  with a 20 minute fade cue to increase the level of the playlist from -30 to 0 as the house filled (i.e the cues were at -30 and the relative fade level was +30) When the group repeated at 22 minutes the cues played at their original -30dB levels. By using an hour fade with 100 percent reached after 20 mins the higher level was held for the time necessary to allow a large safety margin for the curtain up time.

 (A playlist only shuffles when it is triggered, the shuffled order is maintained through loops of the list. This is most often the desired behaviour. If the  cues reshuffled on each loop then cues  could repeat very close to each other either side of the loop)

The attached screen recording demonstrates the problem and solution in a shorter timeframe.

This technique will also work for random groups that are repeatedly triggered in QLab 4 and 5

[Philip Glenn]

Mic, 

Would you consider this behavior a bug? This makes  one of the primary ways I would use a playlist impossible - a constantly looping group of transition tracks that I fade in and out. 

Philip

On Nov 27, 2022, at 5:49 AM, micpool <m...@micpool.com> wrote:

Here's another potential pitfall and a solution.

[micpool]

Philip,

If it was a bug we wouldn’t be discussing it here. 😀(Please report bugs to sup...@figure53.com, not here! Thanks!)

I would rather call it a discussion of a possibly  unforeseen consequence of a specific usage of a feature (the ability of a playlist mode group cue to internally loop a group), which can be overcome in the short term by a workaround, such as the one in my post. 

This behaviour is consistent with the behaviour of other types of groups (e.g random groups), in this and previous versions, so I can see why it works as it does.

Having said that, I can’t personally think of a situation, where the volume of cues resetting when a playlist group loops after a fade, might be useful, so I think it would be perfectly reasonable for you  to submit a feature request to Figure 53 for it to work in a different way.

Mic