We opened our production of Grease last night. The show itself was a huge success. However, We chose to use pre-recorded music. Samuel French doesn't just give you the music, instead you work with a company called Right On Cue Services (not sure if it's a partner or if they are owned by French). They have two software solutions for you music. First there is "Show Ready" sound playback software for rehearsal and then you switch to "Stage Tracks" for performance. These product has been an absolute nightmare. Throughout rehearsal there were constant issues of getting the show ready to do what we wanted to do, it is supposed to be able to add and save cuts to the music, but it wouldn't do it reliably. Tech support was available but not the most helpful. Switching over to Stage Tracks for performances just made it worse. Although the rehearsal software works on a laptop the Stage Tracks only works on iPhone/iPad. I've got a computer with SFX and an 8 track audio interface into my sound system and we have to run off of an iPhone in airplane mode. Stupid! There were big issues just getting it to work initially. It's Apple software! Isn't the point of Apple products is that things just work easily? Not this stuff. It took at least an hour on the phone and in emails over a couple of days just to get the software to work. One of the "features" of Stage Tracks is that they will make cuts to the tracks for you, so you can remove interludes and change the length of dance sequence. However they have been slow to respond and consistently didn't get the cuts the way we asked. After many calls and emails we finally had to choreograph and add 20 seconds of dance to our show an hour before we opened because they never got us our cuts. More emails today trying to get those cuts we requested ready for day two of the show went unanswered without a reply.
I don't know if the problem lies with Samuel French or with Right on Cue Services (or if they are really the same company). But we have been extremely unhappy with the results of this product and the very poor customer service. When you pay $4,000 for show rights and music, you deserve much better service and reliability than this. I'm very unhappy and it will be a long time before I am willing to try working with these products again. Hopefully they will get us the cuts we requested for our third performance, but I'm not optimistic that their customer service will improve on Saturdays.
I don't know if the problem lies with Samuel French or with Right on Cue Services (or if they are really the same company). But we have been extremely unhappy with the results of this product and the very poor customer service. When you pay $4,000 for show rights and music, you deserve much better service and reliability than this. I'm very unhappy and it will be a long time before I am willing to try working with these products again. Hopefully they will get us the cuts we requested for our third performance, but I'm not optimistic that their customer service will improve on Saturdays.
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