Dance festival music playback? CD or PC
- Thread startercoldnorth57
- Start date
themuzicman
Well-Known Member
Computer, copy the CD into your preferred media player.
MarshallPope
Well-Known Member
coldnorth57
Active Member
so you guys are putting in over 1000 files of music to run your dance festival? That is the number of dance numbers i have to deal with.
coldnorth57
Active Member
Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
coldnorth57
Active Member
the dancers put thier enteris in 6 weeks before the festvial but bring their CD in at the lastest an half hour before the session
Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Yup. Almost exactly like the Masquerade at our SF con. We get audio CDs, data CDs, thumb drives... we pull them all into a laptop for playback, but we only have 30 or 40 in an hour...
Sent from my SPH-L720
Sent from my SPH-L720
The dance competitions I have seen are all done by the numbers, starting with dance routine #1 and going to dance routine #infinity. Most of it is hashed out in time to get the programs printed. Inevitably there are changes on the day. Dances get out of order or skipped entirely for any number of reasons. Some competitions have a "Top Ten Showdown" or something similar so you're going to need to be able to pull that list together at some point.
I think what you're looking for is something that will take a given mp3/wma/aaf file and associate it with an entry number. QLab can do this. You'd probably want a script to run after each track is played that can set an indicator that the track has been played. A QLab/Applescript wizard can probably get it to update the background colour on the track after it has been played so you will be reminded when you come across a dance routine that was already played out of sequence.
If you can get the studios to prepend the entry number to the file as a requirement for submitting then it would help you stay organized. Create a directory for each studio so you can hunt things up in a hurry if necessary. Simple sorting by name would put the entire show in the intended order. Drag-and-drop and sort-by-filename would give you your cue list.
The more you can get in advance the better. However, there's always the possibility that you won't see the music until the day of the studio's first performance. Whatever you do has to be able to load the music on the fly with little or no impact on the ongoing performances. Having the track numbering convention lets you accept updates and integrate them fairly easily.
There's still a risk that you'll get some tracks that have been misnamed or duplicated. Many of these studios compete in several locations and might mess up their submissions. Some of them might appreciate the electronic format while others would be annoyed having to duplicate the work they did putting their CD binders together for the other competitions.
FWIW, I should probably change my username from sk8rsdad to dancersdad since my son gave up skateboarding for competitive dance a few years ago.
I think what you're looking for is something that will take a given mp3/wma/aaf file and associate it with an entry number. QLab can do this. You'd probably want a script to run after each track is played that can set an indicator that the track has been played. A QLab/Applescript wizard can probably get it to update the background colour on the track after it has been played so you will be reminded when you come across a dance routine that was already played out of sequence.
If you can get the studios to prepend the entry number to the file as a requirement for submitting then it would help you stay organized. Create a directory for each studio so you can hunt things up in a hurry if necessary. Simple sorting by name would put the entire show in the intended order. Drag-and-drop and sort-by-filename would give you your cue list.
The more you can get in advance the better. However, there's always the possibility that you won't see the music until the day of the studio's first performance. Whatever you do has to be able to load the music on the fly with little or no impact on the ongoing performances. Having the track numbering convention lets you accept updates and integrate them fairly easily.
There's still a risk that you'll get some tracks that have been misnamed or duplicated. Many of these studios compete in several locations and might mess up their submissions. Some of them might appreciate the electronic format while others would be annoyed having to duplicate the work they did putting their CD binders together for the other competitions.
FWIW, I should probably change my username from sk8rsdad to dancersdad since my son gave up skateboarding for competitive dance a few years ago.
coldnorth57
Active Member
thank st8rs or dancers dad i was just seeing if anybody has given any thought to taking the CD out of the dance festival, because we are talking maybe 2000 one trake CDs one clean for compotion and one for practict so there has to be a greener way
There are plenty of software packages available these days to manage the stage, judging, video and audio capture. The missing bit is the audio playback. Seems to me that sooner or later somebody is going to add it. It would be a really trivial piece of coding to trigger the playback. This university project might be a good starting point for an ambitious person. I'm playing with other things at the moment.
Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Really, for me, the issue would be that as the organization with some skin in the game, I would not want to be involved in the legalities of making copies of the music tracks from one format to another. If a dancer brings me their desk with one track on it, it's not really within my locus of control. If however /I/ format shift the track it's a somewhat different story.
Sent from my SPH-L720
Sent from my SPH-L720
Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Dionysus
Well-Known Member
I've been using multiplay to playback dance audio for years, copy CDs and thumb drives, and last year managed to get the instructors to send me all the music a week in advance with a play order! It is glorious. I just have to re order as changes happen in the day. (on PC so no QLab)
I always hated swapping CDs just to find out one didn't burn correctly. After a few times of this it was easy to talk them into sending me music in advance.
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I always hated swapping CDs just to find out one didn't burn correctly. After a few times of this it was easy to talk them into sending me music in advance.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
If you stick with CD, I suggest using a player that is compatible with MP3 files. The reason is that a growing number of people don't understand the requirements of burning an audio disc and just slap MP3 or wav files on in data format. More than a few times, I have been handed a disc that wouldn't play on a conventional CD player, forcing me to run it to a computer to convert and re-burn it. I suppose that's one argument to go to computer playback. On the other side of the coin, using CD makes the responsibility theirs instead of yours. Putting many cuts into a computer is a labor intensive process that invites mistakes.
I've always been interested in the potential copyright issues involved in copying the music files someone provides you to a computer for playback purposes. It is making a copy and that copy is not for personal use, so that seems a potential copyright violation. Playing a CD or nusic file direct off the media provided seems to at least avoid that potential issue.
SOCAN (Canada's answer to ASCAP) has a tariff category for dance competitions for performance.
SODRAC and CMMRA cover licensing for reproduction. However, they don't seem to offer anything in the way of licensing for the purpose of performance playback. They seem more concerned with licensing for sale or distribution. My guess is the reproduction would not likely lead to litigation since there is no plan to redistribute. The dance studio likely didn't secure any right to reproduce so a reproduction of an unauthorized reproduction is a very deep rabbit hole. In the end it's a risk management question. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to see the dance industry shut down over copyright issues.
It gets particularly murky since it could be argued that dance studios fall under "educational use". It could just as easily be argued that "grand rights" apply and the dance studio would be obliged to contract with the artist or the artist's representative directly for every one of their routines.
Ain't copyright law grand?
SODRAC and CMMRA cover licensing for reproduction. However, they don't seem to offer anything in the way of licensing for the purpose of performance playback. They seem more concerned with licensing for sale or distribution. My guess is the reproduction would not likely lead to litigation since there is no plan to redistribute. The dance studio likely didn't secure any right to reproduce so a reproduction of an unauthorized reproduction is a very deep rabbit hole. In the end it's a risk management question. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to see the dance industry shut down over copyright issues.
It gets particularly murky since it could be argued that dance studios fall under "educational use". It could just as easily be argued that "grand rights" apply and the dance studio would be obliged to contract with the artist or the artist's representative directly for every one of their routines.
Ain't copyright law grand?
"Educational use" is much more restrictive than people think and probably does not apply other than maybe for classroom type interaction of established dance curriculums in recognized educational institutions. Once you have more than the instructor and students involved, and particularly if there is an audience, then you can probably assume that pretty much means that it would not be considered an educational use.
As far as copies, from the US Copyright Office, "The reproduction right (i.e., the right to make copies). A "copy" of a work can be any form in which the work is fixed, or embodied, and from which it can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine.12 Courts have held that even the reproduction created in the short-term memory (RAM) of a computer when a program is loaded for use qualifies as a copy." Since the files you would copy to the computer could be played, copied, distributed, etc. then those would seem to be considered copies.
As far as copies, from the US Copyright Office, "The reproduction right (i.e., the right to make copies). A "copy" of a work can be any form in which the work is fixed, or embodied, and from which it can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine.12 Courts have held that even the reproduction created in the short-term memory (RAM) of a computer when a program is loaded for use qualifies as a copy." Since the files you would copy to the computer could be played, copied, distributed, etc. then those would seem to be considered copies.
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