Jason King, Stage Manager at Play with your Food Dinner Theatre in Victoria British Columbia, Canada writes:

Recently during the opening night of the latest show at our dinner theatre, both of our CD players decided during opening that they weren’t going to play the CD’s we had. And if they did play, they skipped.

I left that night determined to find a better solution, even if it meant using iTunes or something. I had looked for sound cue software before, both for the Mac and the PC but never found anything that looked like it would work how I wanted, and had been thinking over the past few years about coding something myself but to my amazement, when I did a Google, I found this gift called “QLab”. One quick download, and an hour or two later I had our entire show transferred and ready to go, …

I thought you might be interested in a project I’ve built for QLab. Because of the limited space at our little venue, I decided a remote “GO” button would be handy and when a friend who runs a local theatre was disposing of an old Light Palette lighting console, I salvaged the “GO” and “STOP” buttons from it and mounted them in a project box. To interface with QLab, I salvaged an old USB Joystick and pulled the controller board out. I mounted that in my box, soldered the two switches to the terminals of two of the old joystick buttons and with the help of a piece of software called “Gamepad Companion” was able to assign them to QLab. Now I have a nice little control box next to the lighting board for triggering cues. The CD players are now there simply as a stand to put the lighting board on.

I’ve attached some photos of the box, and QLab in our venue.

Here are those photos (with my own helpful labels added to the last one). Thanks Jason!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Cool, Sightings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.