Ken Porter
New Member
Greetings all.
I’ve wandered through some conversations about controlling QLab with hotkeys, OSC, and so forth, but here’s what I’m not finding. My (new) dream is to set up a customizable piece of hardware, similar to a big X-Keys device, which would be an ergonomic leap toward making the programming of QLab much more efficient. i.e. replacing a lot of pointing and clicking with task-specific button presses & perhaps a jog/shuttle wheel to rapidly affect timings, levels, what-have-you. I’ve asked the X-Keys folks, but while they’re great at making text macros feed a USB port, they don’t make their devices talk MIDI, nor do they send their results out a network port to reach some UDP or OSC listener.
Then I get to thinking I need some software solution for either the Mac or my networked Windows laptop, which could intercept communication from a specific USB device (in the X-Keys example) and just send it along down a network port… but alas, I can’t find a software solution that would keep some exclusivity, such that it would be the ONLY software to pay attention to what the X-Keys device might generate...
Then I come back to the concept that … Wait a sec - I can’t be the first person to want a big set of custom buttons to help efficiently program a piece of industry standard software… So, I search again, and find stupidly-expensive controls that are used for video editing, or live-event video switching/fun. And they don’t mention how they communicate, or how, if at all, the commands they send might be customizable… Or I find things that talk to a DAW, which I guess is closer, but it’s still not customizable, and who has the time to reverse engineer something that’s not ideal to begin with?
From what I see, the library of OSC commands that QLab can respond to is pretty extensive. And having a few available on some other complicated device to tell QLab what to do now and then seems completely feasible. But I want that x 100. I’ve always found pressing shortcut keys on a keyboard to be far more efficient than hunting and pecking with a mouse. Now I want more immediate access to all the controls that there aren’t enough hotkeys for. I want a jog & shuttle device to tweak pre-wait times. (Maybe at some point I’ll want a display of the QLab UDP text responses, but not now.)
So I guess my question is this:
Has anyone previously had success in the realm of some magic box, sitting next to your computer keyboard, that could be used to make, alter, tweak, rearrange cues significantly faster than typical keyboard & mouse methods?
Given how much time we spend programming, I’m a bit surprised that this doesn’t exist yet, or that it’s hidden so well from the interwebs.
Thoughts?
- K
I’ve wandered through some conversations about controlling QLab with hotkeys, OSC, and so forth, but here’s what I’m not finding. My (new) dream is to set up a customizable piece of hardware, similar to a big X-Keys device, which would be an ergonomic leap toward making the programming of QLab much more efficient. i.e. replacing a lot of pointing and clicking with task-specific button presses & perhaps a jog/shuttle wheel to rapidly affect timings, levels, what-have-you. I’ve asked the X-Keys folks, but while they’re great at making text macros feed a USB port, they don’t make their devices talk MIDI, nor do they send their results out a network port to reach some UDP or OSC listener.
Then I get to thinking I need some software solution for either the Mac or my networked Windows laptop, which could intercept communication from a specific USB device (in the X-Keys example) and just send it along down a network port… but alas, I can’t find a software solution that would keep some exclusivity, such that it would be the ONLY software to pay attention to what the X-Keys device might generate...
Then I come back to the concept that … Wait a sec - I can’t be the first person to want a big set of custom buttons to help efficiently program a piece of industry standard software… So, I search again, and find stupidly-expensive controls that are used for video editing, or live-event video switching/fun. And they don’t mention how they communicate, or how, if at all, the commands they send might be customizable… Or I find things that talk to a DAW, which I guess is closer, but it’s still not customizable, and who has the time to reverse engineer something that’s not ideal to begin with?
From what I see, the library of OSC commands that QLab can respond to is pretty extensive. And having a few available on some other complicated device to tell QLab what to do now and then seems completely feasible. But I want that x 100. I’ve always found pressing shortcut keys on a keyboard to be far more efficient than hunting and pecking with a mouse. Now I want more immediate access to all the controls that there aren’t enough hotkeys for. I want a jog & shuttle device to tweak pre-wait times. (Maybe at some point I’ll want a display of the QLab UDP text responses, but not now.)
So I guess my question is this:
Has anyone previously had success in the realm of some magic box, sitting next to your computer keyboard, that could be used to make, alter, tweak, rearrange cues significantly faster than typical keyboard & mouse methods?
Given how much time we spend programming, I’m a bit surprised that this doesn’t exist yet, or that it’s hidden so well from the interwebs.
Thoughts?
- K
-)) is "if I have a stack of cues running at once, I can *pause* them all at the same time, and then restart them, right?" So there is, at least to some degree, a framing for scrubbing them all at the same time too (which seems the obvious answer to your actual question)...
