[campcaster-support] campcaster started by external control board?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down importimport
    Posts: 0Member
    We're looking into using campcaster as a "digicart" replacement, which
    means we need to use it to cue up sound files, but instead of hitting
    play on the computer, we'd like to be able to trigger it with an
    external signal, presumably coming in over the serial port. Has anyone
    looked into this? Is there support for something like that inside the
    software?
  • 2 Comments sorted by
  • Vote Up0Vote Down importimport
    Posts: 0Member
    Hi,

    Out of the box, Campcaster doesn't have support for external interfaces
    other than a keyboard; that said, it shouldn't be too hard to program in
    some kind of serial port control. I could see how that could be useful not
    only for the use case you've described, but also for things like the new
    mixing boards that send event triggers to external devices when you slide
    up the faders; the station I work at has these hooked up to the CD
    players, so that sliding up the fader sends a 'start' message to the CD,
    and sliding it down sends a 'pause' message.

    If you've got a programmer there at Stanford who'd be willing to look at
    this (and I've heard there are a couple of OK programmers around Wink ),
    we'll be happy to point him or her in the right direction.


    douglas


    ============================================
    Media Development Loan Fund
    =============================================
    Douglas Arellanes
    Head of Research and Development
    Center for Advanced Media--Prague (CAMP)
    Na vinicnich horach 24a/1834, 160 00 Prague 6
    Czech Republic
    Tel: + 420 2 3333 5356, Fax: +420 2 2431 5419
    Mobile: +420 724 073 364
    http://www.mdlf-camp.net
    http://www.campware.org
    =============================================
    http://www.mdlf.org
    =============================================




    Joe Brenner
    Sent by: campcaster-support-bounces@netfinity-4.mdlf.org
    04/04/2007 02:49 AM
    Please respond to Support mailing list for the Campcaster software project


    To: ls-support@netfinity-4.mdlf.org
    cc:
    Subject: [campcaster-support] campcaster started by external control board?



    We're looking into using campcaster as a "digicart" replacement, which
    means we need to use it to cue up sound files, but instead of hitting
    play on the computer, we'd like to be able to trigger it with an
    external signal, presumably coming in over the serial port. Has anyone
    looked into this? Is there support for something like that inside the
    software?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down importimport
    Posts: 0Member
    Douglas.Arellanes@mdlf.org wrote:

    > Joe Brenner wrote:

    > > We're looking into using campcaster as a "digicart" replacement, which
    > > means we need to use it to cue up sound files, but instead of hitting
    > > play on the computer, we'd like to be able to trigger it with an
    > > external signal, presumably coming in over the serial port. Has anyone
    > > looked into this? Is there support for something like that inside the
    > > software?

    > Out of the box, Campcaster doesn't have support for external interfaces
    > other than a keyboard; that said, it shouldn't be too hard to program in
    > some kind of serial port control. I could see how that could be useful not
    > only for the use case you've described, but also for things like the new
    > mixing boards that send event triggers to external devices when you slide
    > up the faders;

    It's the same concept really: if you've got a mixing board already,
    you're going to want to be able to fire from the board, as well as from
    the computer side.

    What about the xml-rpc interface? I presume that's just for the
    "scheduler" and not for the "studio" software.

    > If you've got a programmer there at Stanford who'd be willing to look at
    > this (and I've heard there are a couple of OK programmers around Wink ),
    > we'll be happy to point him or her in the right direction.

    It's not beyond the realm of possibility, but I suspect our station's
    Engineering Department is going to push for just buying a commercial
    solution that works as-is.

    Another feature we probably need is multiple output channels: the DJ
    cues up two or three things they're going to want to use later, and
    then chooses when to play them by hitting controls on the main board.
    My first thought was that this might be doable by running multiple
    instances of the software (with perhaps some hackery involved to get
    them to read different xml files that point them at different
    soundcards), but I strongly suspect that it would be too awkward
    manipulating all the different windows, trying to remember which is
    output channel one, and which is output channel two, and so on.
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