Our theater started with an old home style Sony CD player ... pain in the
butt.
Then one of the former sound guys bought the theater a Boss SP-303 sampler, with 8 big buttons and 4 bank selections that could give you up to 32 sounds at the tap of a
button. This was great at first, until you start to actually load sounds on it. The machine is a dinosaur in terms of
current PC and flash memory technology ... accepts only a SmartMedia card, 64mb max, all files must be placed on the card in 44.1kHz wav format or else they won't upload, and the "upload" takes forever on the little
processor that's inside.
That's when I bought a Stanton cd.500 dual DJ CD player. I don't use most of the functions, but the
cue/
play buttons are big, the player does
cue right up to the beginning of the sound for each
track so you get instant sound when you push the
button, single
play prevents me from running over to the next
track, and dual players allow me to cross-fade and
overlay sounds when needed. The only thing I need to do on my PC is to set up the sound effects and cut CDs. One problem here is that I end up making several versions of the FX CD for each show, and every time there is a slight change to any one sound
effect, I have to cut a new CD (or pair of CDs, depending on what's changing). Another problem is that to place sound in any one of the
house speakers I have to make sub-out and pan adjustments on the sound board for each
cue. Kind of a pain, and not easy to teach a junior sound board operator.
So, I'm moving to PC entirely, using Sound
Cue Systems software and an M-Audio card that gives me 6 output channels and the ability to
throw sound wherever I want, pan,
fade,
overlay, loop,
etc at the click of a
mouse or the press of a keyboard
button. My next show will be on SCS ... and I will cut a CD to use as backup just in case. But a PC solution also alleviates the need for me to cut CDs every time a small change is needed ... and most or all of these changes will be able to be done in real time with the SCS editor.
From what I've heard there are a ton of SCS users out there and all are happy. You do have to turn off certain things on Windows to prevent program interruptions, but I don't think it's problematic. SCS also has a
MIDI interface for controls.
I hear a lot of people recommending
Qlab for
Mac, and I would suspect that solution is equally successful.