Triggering StageTracks w/ QLab

[Aralister]

So I'm very new to QLab and sound work in general. I was provided with a StageTracks license for the show and I've been trying to get QLab (I'm currently running QLab4) to play the tracks in StageTracks all on the same PC (running both programs at once) using OSCulator, but I have almost 0 clue how to even start doing that. MIDI is foreign to me and the tweaks I make don't seem to be doing anything. Does anyone have any knowledge, or advice, or anything similar?

 

[AlexDavila]

I found a Reddit thread with someone asking how to do the same thing and saw the response mentioning using OSCulator. I’m guessing you’re trying to make QLab hit keyboard shortcuts to control Stage|Tracks. I’m not sure how you do this in the same machine because the application listening to the keyboard generally is the active app, but if you’re using QLab to trigger, it’s going to be the active app and thus is the one getting the keyboard input from OSCulator.

I’ve gotten around this in a sort of similar situation by using an external midi controller to trigger a cue in QLab with it in the background, but I don’t know if you want to go down that rabbit hole. I think you could make it work if you put Stage|Tracks and OSCulator on a separate computer on the same network as your QLab computer, have QLab send an OSC command to OSCulator to trigger the keyboard shortcut in the background with Stage|Tracks as the active app.

 

[Malabaristo]

Ugh. If you don't actually need any of the loop/repeat/jump functionality in StageTracks, then you might be better off ripping the audio out and putting it directly in QLab as you would any other audio source. Obviously that's not an officially sanctioned approach, and takes some work to do... but I had nothing but frustrations during my one (and hopefully only) encounter with StageTracks.