What about audio cueing and stuff? I like iTunes but you cant
play two things at once and is there anything that incorporates sound cues and light cues together I love cross integration.
There isn't any software that I know of that directly runs lighting and sound cues from the same program. This does not mean that you can't have a unified control
system though. There is software like
QLab,
Macs Cue, and
Ex Cues for running sound cues.
QLab is probably the most full featured of the three, capable of running sound and media cues as well as sending
MIDI commands.
And what about
midi isn't that stuff usually processed through a computer and if so how does the stuff work on a
mac.. USB? Cause like iMac only has one sound input and one out put same goes for the
mac books/pro so whats the best option there... USB again? (well unless you spend like $10K on a nice
mac pro.) come on people talk. help us out here. ideas?? ideas??
MIDI, or Musical
Instrument Digital Interface is a control
protocol that has been adopted by the
theatre world for what we
call MIDI Show Control or
MSC.
MIDI was originally designed to allow musical instruments to talk to a computer for the purposes of communicating what an
instrument is doing.
MIDI does not contain any audio signal at all.
MIDI can be used with any modern computer
system. You can get
MIDI PCI card or USB
MIDI devices. The number of audio in/out ports on a computer has no bearing on
MIDI.
The real question is what you want to be able to do with
MIDI. You can use
MSC to trigger cues on many
theatre devices. If you have software capable of sending
MSC commands you can control things like lighting consoles, digital sound consoles, other computers,
etc. By the same token, if you have software on the computer configured to take
MSC commands you can have many other devices control the computer
On the flip side, you can also use products like the
Rosco Keystroke to trigger cues on your computer from the lighting
console. The Keystroke can be configured to "push" different keys or combinations of keys when it is
fed certain
DMX values from the
console. Keystroke works with both PC and
Mac.