From: Spencer Russell <Spencer.Russell(a)oberlin.edu>
Sorry for the late reply. I have read the responses! Some interesting
leads! Postfish looks interesting if I could get it to compile. :))
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 10:19:13PM +0000, philicorda
wrote:
Hi.
I was just wondering whether there are any open source applications on
Linux for doing theatre sound for plays and dance, or if anyone else is
interested in collaborating on making one or has experience with this
kind of thing.
I'm starting to get more gigs doing theatre sound design, and
it's looking like I'm going to start designing some custom PD
patches to do what I need, so I'll be happy to share what I come
up with. Are you on the pd-list?
Not yet, I will join now.
I can't code, but have a some experience with
PD, which may do the job
with a custom gui.
Personally, my requirements are...
The concept of 'scenes' that can be stepped through, like a lighting
desk.
This is something that I'm probably not going to have time for on
my current project, but it's something that i can definently see
getting done this summer.
The ability for fast forward and rewind within a scene. Mainly for
rehearsal reasons.
What exactly would your ideal "scene" consist of?
At the moment, the backing tracks (about 5 channels) which just play,
and few triggarable samples. The way of getting from one scene to
another is different for each scene too. Some crossfade, others I catch
a sound in a reverb, and cue the next track as it dies away.
Part of the problem with this kind of stuff, as I'm sure you know, is
that the stage action for the next cue does not often fall in a
musically useful place. Hence the messing about with crossfades etc.
My current
setup involves some sounds that continuously repeat(usually
several source sounds arranged differently into one continuous
ambient sound) and some sound effects that I load onto my sampler
and trigger from the buttons on that. Right now I've been putting
the background ambience on CDs and letting it play, but I'm going
to need a more flexible setup, which I've got some ideas on
implementation in PD.
I've been doing ambient loops just by copy and pasting a loop to make a
long track, then playing the whole lot in the same way. Real looping
would be nicer as a few abstract loops could be out of sync which would
break any audible repitition.
The ability to switch from scene to scene
instantly, or to have preset
or manual crossfades. (Often you are following cues from the
performers.)
It has to be bomb proof and have a simple gui even a lampie can
understand.
PD GUIs aren't usually that pretty, but they can be made as
simple as the designer can make them.
Simple is good. I think it's perfectly possible to make a useful gui in
pd for this kind of thing.
Midi control of scene switching and manual
crossfades.
This should be easy in PD
The ability to set volume levels for each scene.
The ability to change the order and add new tracks without too much
pain.
One of PD's weaknesses is saving its state, which would be
critical in this sort of application. There's some work being
done to change this, but for the immediate future I'll probably
be creating patches that are pretty specific to individual
shows(although I'm sure I'll come up with some very handy and
reusable abstractions). At some point I'd like to get back into
coding, and this is the sort of project that I would really like
to work on, and seems like a lot of people could use it. For now,
though, I think I'll hack together some PD patches, and keep you
posted.
I end up usually with loads of bangs attached to number boxes for the
initial space. I have seen pd patches where all the data is in files and
is loaded and parsed on the load bang, but it looked kinda complicated.
Perhaps the whole thing could be broken down into pd patches. A scene
backing player, a triggarable sampler, a programmable cross fader.
Then you could assemble the ones you need for each scene. The difficulty
is as you say in saving the state and seamless transitions between each
collection of modules.
Spencer