If a band member can’t make a gig/practice at the last minute, then it would be handy to have a media player instance in each song that plays their pre-recorded instrument part.
Each media player instance is obviously song-specific, but I want to be able to disable/enable all these media players, across all songs, for the entire gig using a single setting/switch.
Any thoughts?
Hi Pete,
You could control whether they played a file that had sound on it from the background rack. To do it you would need to have a short blank file to load into the media player to act as an alternative to the recorded instrument file that is already loaded.
Then you could set up bindings in the BG rack that selected either the blank file or the recorded one globally using Media Player by Index as the target of the bindings.
I used a controller bar button set to be a toggle switch to set the media player load choice globally.
If you want to get fancy with the button display of the mode you can add these bindings ( only available on very recent builds)
binding for the LIVE mode message
binding for the backing track mode
So, those are my suggestions, I hope they help.
Cheers,
Dave
I also would love to have ability to disable a particular Media player. I’ve always thought that Media Players should have a button to enable them the same as plugins — then a binding could unload or suspend the media player. Is this something @brad might implement ?
You can achieve a similar thing by setting the selected file in the media player to “None”.
As for disabling media players across all songs, you could try this:
Suppose Paul’s the bass player… call all the media players for his parts “Paul’s Part” (or something similar)
In the background rack, add a binding like this. This effectively sets the media player file to “None” for any media player named “Paul’s Part” anytime a song is loaded.
When Paul turns up disable the binding, when he goes AWOL enable it.
So, the above should work but for some reason it doesn’t (which I’ll look into later). But clicking the “Timing” button in the binding window and setting a small delay (20ms seems enough) works around it:
Does this help?
Hmm, a useable workaround at least – but if you wanted to be able to re-enable the normal Media Player function it would require selecting the particular file you wanted to normally hear (and that gets messy if there’s multiple files in the Media Player).
I suppose another (cleaner) solution would be to the name the output route of the Media Player and use a binding to enable/disable the route. But still not as neat as having a binding to toggle the suspended state of the Media Player, the same as can be done for a plugin or rack.
– Jimbo
Thanks Dave! Great idea!
Thanks @Corky but Brad’s solution is superior IMO. I modified it so it could be toggle switch activated by bindings using his suggestion.
This binding in the BG rack sets -1 or “None” for the player effectively disabling it. I used about 20 ms delay to make it get along with the next binding. I also put 20 ms delay on the other binding.
This binding sets the file to load that plays back
I set up some bindings to indicate what the mode was like this
This one sets a message of “BACKING TRACK” when the toggle is set ON
This one sets a message of “LIVE” when the toggle switch is 0.
Thanks to Brad I know that -1 will get me there in this case.
Dave
Thank you for the advice, and the visuals.
Before getting back to this post, I found a simple workaround/solution. I do like all the above suggestions also though!
I created a folder on disk for each performer containing the media files for their respective songs. e.g. the “Drummer” folder contains a drum recording file for each song we play.
I then have a media player in each song for each of our performers e.g. drummer, bass, vocal that plays their part in that song.
I then rename each performer folder to a different name, e.g. “xxxDrummer”, so their media player can no longer find the drummer’s parts.
If the drummer doesn’t show up, then I just rename their folder back to “Drummer” and all their parts start playing in all the songs again.
This also works well for when I’m practicing at home… I correctly name every band member’s folder, and it’s I like I’m playing with the whole band again!
Yes, definitely the ability to disable a media player would be better, and I’ve logged it here.
