Butch wrote:For all it's faults SAC SAW when running mics ,lights and playback makes my life a little better hope I can do the same with AMP if it ever appears maybe use Multiplay to trigger lights and AMP scenes ???
Butch
Ugh! I feel your pain. That probably took you two to three time longer to set up in SAW than it should have had SAW not been so damn clunky or if SAC just responded to MIDI directly to recall a darn scene. (in SAW's defense it's really a DAW with a couple of live features strapped on rather than a proper live/performance playback/control app)
As for AMP it has modest playback built right in. So depending on what you want/need you might be able to have that do the playback for you as part of a scene recall. I always want more control (routing, track count, etc..) and am used to more professional tools for playback so I'm usually using QLab or CSC or occasionally SFX. And those obviously can deal with any control type applications like firing off a lighting console.
Anyway, while I have only been experimenting with it so far (i.e. not used it for a production yet) AMP should allow you to recall scenes via MIDI. At the moment it's only a tool to recall the current scene in standby. I'm hoping that will eventually change to allow recall of specific scene numbers via MIDI. Not sure how far down the wish list that ability is. The good thing is that the structure is there for it to happen. While each scene is a file in AMP, like SAC, there are 1000 scene "slots". So the scenes have numbers which means it should be a lot easier for this Bob to allow for MIDI recall of Scenes using standard Bank Select/Patch Change Commands. In SAC that would have required either adding another screen or the end user assigning scenes numbers by hand in some kind of scene properties or the like.
I have for several shows now had the host computer running both the AMP Host software and CSC Playback software, each addressing it's own dedicated audio interface. (MOTU PCI for AMP, Firewire Echo Audiofire for CSC) Then I have an AMP remote that the op is using to mix the show. CSC is fired off either via the Stage Manger (directly at the host computer) in the control booth or we remote or extend the screen on CSC to FOH.
For one venue I work in during the summer the plan is to move the AMP host to backstage, so all the mic lines will be vastly shorter and likely sound a hell of a lot better. Then I will be using a digital snake to get audio feeds to the FOH mix. The FOH mix computer will run both AMP GUI and CSC audio playback. (audio interface connected to the GUI/Remote computer) The sound from CSC will then get backstage to the AMP host via the digital snake.
For another show that just ran this past weekend I used Live Professor (think I got the name right this time) running on a 2nd computer to handle playback and reverb tasks. It was just connected via ADAT optical to the MOTU cards on the AMP host.
Point is..... I miss almost nothing about SAC/SAW. I haven't put it into a show in almost a year except for Idaho Shakespeare last summer. (AMP wasn't to a point where I was going to use it in a LORT last summer, especially in a venue where I'm not personally on site for most of the summer and the crew knew SAC) And I can not really express how nice it is that I haven't had to play ANY bullshit networking games to make things work any longer. No more nonsense like sharing drives and messing around with permissions and network names. AMP just works and I can save the mix session (called Config in AMP) or write/update scenes from any GUI on the network with zero issues.