Background Music

[macsound]

Wondering how you handle background music playback? Wondering because I'm tired of my personal devices being tethered wherever the music is being played.

I've purchased and used music legal music for businesses many times over the years, from CDs to SD card players, iPods, dedicated media players and the like.
Having worked in Hotels, I've always appreciated the music always running and I just had to turn up the volume on the Crestron in the particular room.

In your "installed" spaces, do you have dedicated iPods, old iPhones or computers that are always playing music or do you bring something in every time?

 

[CrazyTechie]

The one summer I worked for a theme park we ran the park BGM through Q-SYS. Tons of control for what plays where and when.

 

[chausman]

The one summer I worked for a theme park we ran the park BGM through Q-SYS. Tons of control for what plays where and when.

Current theme park employee. Park audio running through Crown's equivalent of Q-SYS. Individual attractions run dedicated Mac Mini's running Qlab receiving triggers via OSC. And a small smattering of BooTunes (AMPED!) for small things with little coordination.

 

[dbaxter]

The first sound cue in the show file is usually a looped play list (m3u). Auto advance to a fade cue at 'House to half'.

 

[macsound]

Maybe I'm asking something a little too big picture.
What I meant to ask was more applicable to theatres and other single venue events.

 

[StradivariusBone]

I bought a dual CD rack mount player a few years back to replace a dead consumer grade player. It was this one from Denon, but it seems like it is sadly discontinued. It's nice because it has balanced/unbalanced outs as well as USB slots and SD card slots. So deck A is house music and B is for the occasions where we need to playback from something other than QLab. I keep an SD card with a bunch of royalty-free house music in there and it works fine for us. For rentals and one-offs that require specific pre/post show music, we'll do the trick that @dbaxter suggested, but having a unique device for house playback allows us to also route that to our lobby feed which is nice.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

I put a QLab group of MP3 tracks in the cue list, cue 0.

Cue 0.5 is a fade on the group, possible auto-follow to

Cue 0.7 which is a preshow announce, if we have a prerecorded one.

We have BMI and ASCAP blankets for the facility, so I pretty much pick what stones me for the type of event it is.