SAFP Question

General discussion about Gig Performer
1

So I’m using the Streaming Audio File Player successfully to play backing trax for our band. With my 6 channel out interface and a little wiring, I’m able to send the main trax out in stereo, a cue track in mono, and my metronome output in mono - all to different inputs on our mixer so we can have cue and click only in IEMs and trax going to FOH. I have a widget on the Global rack space to start the metronome, and I set my 2 or 3 SAFPs to “Sync with Host” and all is well. I start the metronome via a mapped button on my keyboard, an voila!, my trax all start up synced together with the click and each other and it WORKS PERFECTLY!

Now - that’s great for shows, but when rehearsing or putting things together, it would be nice to start the trax at some point in the middle - like you’re practicing the bridge maybe, and want to start there. I have not been able to figure out how to start my 2 or 3 SAFPs along with my metronome, all synced, from a marker in the middle of the song or even a random point selected in the timeline. I’m hoping there is some easy way to do this that I’m just not aware of. Thanks!

2

The SAFP syncs to the Global playhead, not the other way around—meaning that the Global playhead has its own beat and bar count that isn’t going to change regardless of where in the track you place an SAFP marker. So, unless your marker is starting exactly on beat in the track, it won’t be in sync with the Global playhead.

3

That’s fine - I think - I can worry about starting on a bar. But im not sure how to tell the metronome to start playing if i start the SAFP at somewhere other than the beginning?

4

You’ll have to de-select the ‘Sync with host’ option if you want to start from a marker position that isn’t the beginning. You can include actions in a marker that start the metronome and global playhead, and you can include loop markers for repeating a particular section of the track.
The SAFP at current isn’t set up to do what you want to do very easily.

5

I have the exact same use case and have something that works, kind of…

I use two instances of SAFP in the Global Rackspace, one for the Click (L) and Guide cues (R) and another instance for the Backing tracks. Note that I don’t use GP’s internal metronome, but rather a real audio track for this (which immediately also takes care of all kinds of tempo and meter changes).

After creating the necessary markers in the main SAFP (Click/Guide), I copied those to the second instance. You can copy those to all additional instances if needed as well…
Using the new Song Part actions in v5.0.20, I added for each Song Part an ‘SAFP Go To Marker’ action for each SAFP instance, each time pointing to the same marker. When selecting a Song Part, both instances then jump in perfect sync to the correct position. This works perfectly, except it is not synchronized to the Global Playhead, which means you cannot rely on the built-in metronome to remain in sync, e.g.

In case you don’t use Song Parts, but rather wish to simply go to a previous or next marker, you can add two widgets in the Global Rackspace (next to the buttons you need to actually trigger Next/Previous Marker in the main SAFP instance). One referring to the main SAFP instance’s ‘Triggered Marker’ action, the second to the ‘Go To Marker’ action of the second instance. Normally, you could then simply link the two widgets, but for some reason the ‘Triggered Marker’ action has an offset of 2 (showing ‘2’ instead of ‘0’ for the first marker, ‘3’ for the second marker and so on…). So, I just wrote a small GPScript function that updates the ‘Go To marker’ widget with the ‘Triggered Marker’ value minus 0.002, which does the trick. That said, I still am puzzled why this offset is there, so perhaps this will need to be fixed in a later version of GP (in the previous versions the offset was also only 1, so something is off, I think).

For rehearsals, I also added a few ‘count-in’ markers, about two bars before the actual point where a song section starts. This then allows me to do a combination of the two actions above: I select the song part we want to start at, hit my ‘Previous’ marker button, and then the track starts 2 bars before the actual Song Part. During shows, these markers then do nothing, of course.

One thing to look out for. I also use the same markers the other way around, so, to activate a Song Part using a Marker action in the main SAFP. In most cases this does not create issues at all, but I have one or two cases where it takes a bit too long for the Song Part to actually be activated, which then causes a slight hiccup (timeline goes back to the marker after it was already triggered slightly earlier). In my case, the main offender seems to be the B3-X plugin in my Global Rackspace, which takes a long time (more than 0.5s) to get out of bypass. As far as I understand, the Song Part’s actions are then executed only when all plugins are also active, causing the marker to be re-triggered again. My workaround for this is to add another marker in the main SAFP, slightly before the actual one triggering the Song Part selection, that already ‘un-bypasses’ the B3-X plugin about 2 bars earlier… So far, I have not found any other plugin that has this behavior so transitions are seamless in most cases.

I hope this all makes sense. As @edm11 mentioned, it is not easy, has a few drawbacks (e.g., not sync’ed to Global Playhead), but not impossible. It currently works for me…