Music Playback

Hiya all, wonder if anyone can help me....

I work at a 1300 capacity theatre, and having just invested significant amounts of money, we now have a brand new sound system.

Fully digital multicore and mixing desk (Yamaha M7, and Ethersound - for any sound geeks B) ).

However, we currently don't have a satisfactory method of music playback in a show envoronment. As such the boss has asked me to look into possible soloutions.

So, what I am looking to do is be able to pop a CD into a drive, rip the tracks that I need, and populate a playlist. I need to be able to activate tracks using 'hot keys' on the keybord, and they must start instantly.

Also, I need to be able to do this 2 or 3 times, on the same machine, spitting 3 different stereo sources into my sound desk. So, having 3 different playlists, routed to 3 different outputs/soundcards.

Is there any software about that would be upto the task?

Cheers all!

Steve

Hiya all, wonder if anyone can help me....

I work at a 1300 capacity theatre, and having just invested significant amounts of money, we now have a brand new sound system.

Fully digital multicore and mixing desk (Yamaha M7, and Ethersound - for any sound geeks B) ).

However, we currently don't have a satisfactory method of music playback in a show envoronment. As such the boss has asked me to look into possible soloutions.

So, what I am looking to do is be able to pop a CD into a drive, rip the tracks that I need, and populate a playlist. I need to be able to activate tracks using 'hot keys' on the keybord, and they must start instantly.

Also, I need to be able to do this 2 or 3 times, on the same machine, spitting 3 different stereo sources into my sound desk. So, having 3 different playlists, routed to 3 different outputs/soundcards.

Is there any software about that would be upto the task?

Cheers all!

Steve
[/b]

While I haven't seen anything that will do everything you need, I can tell you what the requirements would be to meet your needs and possibly give you a direction for an adequate solution.

To be able to rip and play simultaneously without affecting the playback quality it will have to support multiple core/processor allocation accordingly, reserving at least one core or processor for playback operation. I'm assuming that you want high quality rips (lossless) for playback so the CPU cycles needed for ripping will be less than if you wanted to compress the tracks.

To route different play lists to different outputs, it will need to support multiple sound cards or multiple output channels on a single card (logical devices). Even with multiple output device support, it might be difficult to find a software package that manages different play lists for each logical device. Another option would be if it support a command line option or configuration file to allow you to open multiple instances, each attached to a different output path, using a shortcut.

As for the hot-key support, that one's obvious.

If you break the ripping and playback down to specifics, it might be easier to find 2 different programs to meet your solution requirements.

For play back (using multiple instances), check out Aqualung (http://aqualung.factorial.hu/home.html). It supports command line options to select an output device so you can set up shortcuts for each output. I only came across it while I was doing some research and I haven't tried it personally. I'm sure there are others out there and perhaps someone who's been using Linux longer than I can provide a better solution.

I haven't done any ripping on the Linux platform, so I can't make any suggestions there, but again, perhaps another with more experience can assist.

Hope this helps.