Sound Effects on Cue

[justintyme]

Just as a final word, I run an AmDram sound system which we port round to various church halls etc every year, including the panto season. I now use a standard PC laptop with the free version of CSC showcontrol plus for 'hot starts' I use their incredibly simple HotSpot software. Again free from CSC. Its unsupported, but what the heck, its so simple. It gives you 64 assignable keys which you can colour to your choice and type the name of the effect on the key as well all in glorious technicolour. For those frequent moments when the character jumps four pages straight to a sound effect that is two cues away from where you are its fantastic! You just hit whatever key you have assigned, and the beauty is you can see it straight away.

Hardware wise, I run the laptop through a DI box to clean up the sound and straight into a small sound desk. From there it goes to the normal amps, and I use three, back stage effects, back stage monitors and front of house.

Takes a few minutes to set up but it avoids the sometimes dreadful sound systems in the WI Halls! Good Luck

[Jivemaster]

My preferred hardware solution is a minidisc player with remote -put the tracks on the disc and tag them with words.

 

My preferred digital option would be a cheap lappy with PCDJ (because I have a spare copy or ten) I use a PII/300 for sound and with a fresh clean install of W2K so far it has been faultless.

 

With ANY PC option please check that your sound is clean, either a proper balanced soundcard or a stereo DI box to break all hum loops. Laptops are specially prone to add noise to systems without careful consideration of the power supply and signal out. Yes an external USB soundcard may well help with quality issues (and the cheap one from Maplin is fine).

[peternewman]

If you go down the software route, there is a fairly comprehensive listing of available software on the Blue Room wiki.