Thoughts about Streaming Audio File Player

General discussion about Gig Performer
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Im using reaper to play metronome track, cue track, mix track muted (useful for rehearsals) and backing(samples) track. It’s on a timeline so I can go wherever I want. If I want to practice only outro of a song I move the playhead and start playing from there. Thanks to Realearn I can send midi on markers to change song parts, song and so on.

When I heard about streaming audio file player I thought - finally! But then, after testing it. I think I cannot replicate my daw possibilities.

Only one track on one instance. Ok, I can make more than one instance, but then it won’t sync up from a random place, Only from the start. cause I must use global playhead. And when I’m not using global I need to make cumbersome setups, like making widgets for every instance and linking all of the functions. And it still limits me to only moving to markers.

Copying the markers- why I can’t copy only one? When using two SAFP(for short) I don’t want to change song part on every instance. But I want to move to next marker on every one. But as stated above, no sync unless global sync.

I must use different rackspaces per song part, not variations (Different plugins in different parts). So that forces me to use SAFP on global rackspace.

There’s no feedback option. So when I place a marker that says - change song part here. It does that when SAFP is playing and stumbles upon that marker. But when I manually change the song part I cannot tell SAFP to move to that marker in a simple way.

I think that in this form SAFP is a weird addition to GP, that feels like bandaid sticked on healthy skin.

Sorry about this rant, but functionalities of GP are awesome, and sometimes far better than DAW, so simple song and song part changing with limited resources, midi capabilities, but sometimes I can’t understand decision in the making. Limited button colors, undo that works half a time, textfield without ability to make another row are some of those. SAFP is for now another one for me.

Relayer I can’t use too, because it won’t work to different machine, and I have DAW on second - studio Mac, not my personal rig. My thought was that I could move most of the setup to my personal rig, and use daw only for full mix recording.

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Can you confirm this summary:

  • Your main challenge with the SAFP will be solved if it could play multiple tracks simultaneously?
  • It would be helpful if there was a way to jump to a SAFP marker/action for a song/part change based on a manual selection you have made for a song/part i.e. bidirectional sync for song/part changes.
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We always appreciate feedback and your observations are very useful but I think it’s worth commenting on some of them

The SAFP was intended for soloists wishing to play a single backing track to accompany their singing or playing. A version that will support multiple tracks per song with individual muting/volume, etc., is in the works but (in line with our policies) we cannot say when it will be available.

We do hear this a lot but frankly such things have been secondary to our primary goal of being a reliable system for people performing on stage, at which point one is presumably not interested in admiring button colors :slight_smile: Such things are on our list but are frankly not high priority relative to other items. We know that undo can be improved as well

In terms of decision making, the intent was for markers to drive changing song parts (or rackspaces or to tweak widget values, etc), not the other way round and as you might imagine, allowing a marker to switch to a song part which then switches to another marker will cause all sorts of complications. But we’ll probably add another action to allow a marker to be selected from a song part with a “be careful what you ask for” warning :slight_smile:

I’m not sure how to respond to this one. We never presented Relayer as a tool for transporting audio/midi on a network so complaining that it can’t be used because of this missing feature is kinda like complaining that your new bicycle can’t fly :slight_smile:

It was explicitly designed for low latency communication between multiple instances of GP on a single machine (which allows secondary instances to be plugin “servers” with the possibility of running on different cores) and to share audio between GP and a DAW running on the same machine. If you want to transport audio across multiple machines, then free tools like AudioGridder or commercial plugins such as Bluecat Connector make this possible.

But in terms of a design decision, we don’t really see many people running multiple machines on stage and I’m suspecting that your own use case may be somewhat of an outlier.

All the above said, in the meantime, much of what you’re trying to do can still be accomplished (albeit with perhaps some difficulty) using GP Script, which can be viewed as an escape hatch to add functionality that is not (yet!) built into GP.

Again, thanks for your feedback.

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:partying_face: :partying_face: :partying_face::+1: :+1: :+1:

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Thank’s guys for you response!
@rank13 Multiple tracks is the most important function. It simplifies the whole setup. The bidirectional sync would be cool addition, but not as important as the first one.

@dhj

Blockquote A version that will support multiple tracks per song with individual muting/volume, etc., is in the works

Soo, I need to be more patient then :upside_down_face:

Blockquote We do hear this a lot but frankly such things have been secondary to our primary goal of being a reliable system for people performing on stage , at which point one is presumably not interested in admiring button colors :slight_smile:

It’s not about admiring or making complex setups, but rather for speeding things up on stage. I can memorize the colors easier for a fuction, rather than reading what it does. I personally would prefer one simple knob design and fader design, but ability to change color to what I want. But that’s me. I know that you trying to replicate feel of a real gear rack. That’s why we have tape labels and so on. I’m not In favor of it, but I know that there are people that do appreciate it. So no worries :slight_smile:
Maybe simple solution would be to create additional one simple knob, button, fader design, that would allow to change color with system color wheel? I’m not a programmer so I cannot tell if it is a easy task.

Blockquote But we’ll probably add another action to allow a marker to be selected from a song part with a “be careful what you ask for” warning :slight_smile:

I know it’s a risky one. I think if I would have the ability to change the playhead position and synchronize all of the other samples it would be enough. I would move the playhead to right before the marker and play.

Blockquote I’m not sure how to respond to this one. We never presented Relayer as a tool for transporting audio/midi on a network so complaining that it can’t be used because of this missing feature is kinda like complaining that your new bicycle can’t fly :slight_smile:

I don’t know why, but when I saw Relayer that was the first thing that I thought, and I wasn’t the only one, cause I saw comments about it too.
I would talk more in your communication about the latency. Because I thought, what’s the difference between this and loopback app. And frankly I don’t know still? That’s why I thought, we have loopback, so this must be something else. I didn’t know about Connector or AudioGridder, so thank you for that!

Blockquote All the above said, in the meantime, much of what you’re trying to do can still be accomplished (albeit with perhaps some difficulty) using GP Script

Im not a scrippter, so that’s a problem, but I know Its powerful.

Thank’s for taking the time to address all my observations!

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[blog] How to offload the processing of audio plugins to remote computers using AudioGridder

[blog] How to use a single-client ASIO driver with multiple applications on Windows

Some blog articles worth checking out.

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