Dear WAMUGgers
Thank you all for your recent helpful advice re playing single items
in iTunes at our school concert. We had the concert today and it was
fantastic. We got great feedback from the parents, staff and of
course our rockin' rollin' kiddies!
For your knowledge this is what we did.
Firstly we unchecked the tick boxes in the playlist so each track
would play and stop without the next one starting. The kids (my
little techie group) went through the various visualisers and chose
several different ones for different tunes. The plan was to choose
each visualiser then run the separate tunes accordingly with the kids
singing alongside and the visualiser projecting onto the big screen
behind (actually next to them as it turned out).
Then I decided we needed something even simpler. It would have been
nice to have different visualisers but really we didn't need that
complication. KISS is a good policy when it comes to these things I
believe.
Brian had suggested G-Force as a good visualiser and as I had a basic
copy already installed I went to the website http://
www.soundspectrum.com/ and discovered that I could download a Gold or
Platinum version if I paid good money to them (PayPal). Rob suggested
Gaslight which is very nice too. However I went with G-force this
time. Does Gaslight have the options I detail below?
For around Au$40 I could download the latest full version of G-Force,
a Standalone Version and Sound Spectrum Darkroom. More on these soon.
Maybe a bit much for a visualiser but hey, this could be interesting.
$40 is not a bad investment for a successful end of year concert,
especially when we're going to run it on a Mac in an all PC school.
It's tax deductible too!
So I paid for it, got my registration code and downloaded the software.
Here's what happened:
Sound Spectrum Darkroom allowed us to save each single track as a
self-contained Quicktime movie, complete with G-Force Visualiser.
This produced some really great effects with original quality - I
kept the music format as .aiff and used no compression. (720 x 576 is
the maximum screen resolution for $40 but that's quite Ok for a
visualiser)
We put all the tracks into a desktop folder and when all were
selected and opened together they layered nicely in the finder
window. We learnt to prefix each numerically in reverse order,
allowing the first item of the concert to appear in the front in the
layer. Eg with 8 tracks we numbered the first one *8 We Will Rock
You* so it would appear at the front of the stack. (Think about that
for a minute. We needed to, before discovering the logic of this move!)
Techie Yr 7 kid then needed simply to click on the front window,
click Apple/Cmd-F and the music, complete with visualiser opened to
full screen and played to the end. Any mistake could be solved with
*Space Bar - Escape*. We never needed this as it eventuated.
With the PowerBook hooked into the school's old but great Yamaha 6
channel mixer/amp and big bore Yami speakers, we lifted the seagulls
off the roof, and the grannies out of their seats - truly - we could
see the shadows of the gulls walking across the skylight panels -
funny indeed - and the grannies? Well...!
Now the piece-de-resistance:
G-Force Standalone rocks!
It has a keyboard command interface that could be more user friendly,
as it took me a long time trawling the FAQs and instructions to find
this solution, but having done that it worked perfectly!
Simply put, with various keyboard commands you can open it to a range
of screen sizes and resolutions, and vary the input sound devices. By
setting it to 1152 x 768 resolution and sound input being set to the
PowerBook internal microphone, we were then able to run this software
visualiser for live sound in the hall.
Imagine the kid's surprise seeing their "voices" being projected onto
the big screen when singing the National Anthem. They sang louder
than ever, a great motivator I thought!.
Then when our pedantic music teacher plonk-rocked away on the piano,
it too was visualised on the big screen. The kids playing their
glockenschpiedelhunds noticed too. We refrained from running it
during the boss's big speech but were tempted. He may not have fully
understood what was going on behind him.
Anyway, thank you all for your help in getting this done. We had a
great day.
I'm happy to share more information with anyone interested, on or off-
list.
Regards
Reg
PS Yay, the kiddies go home tomorrow to be with mummies and daddies
and carers for Christmas.
