A common thing to happen in a play is to have a telephone that rings. There are many ways to ring telephones onstage, but in the current show that I'm running, our telephone, a standard desk telephone with bells inside of it, must ring through a wireless speaker. So, that means playing a sound of a telephone ringing through the speaker. Easy, right? But what if they pick up the phone in the middle of the ring? You can't just stop the sound cue, because in a telephone the clapper would stop hitting the bells, but the bells would naturally ring out. So, you split the sound into two parts, the ringing, and the ring-out. So, you play the ringing, then when the actor picks up the phone, you play the ring out. But now you have to carefully listen to the phone ringing, and NOT play the ring-out if the actor has picked up the phone in between rings! ACK. That sounds like stressful work to me, the intrepid sound operator.

Computers to the rescue!

I wrote a little AppleScript for QLab 3 which listens to the phone ringing for me, and determines if the phone is mid-ring or between rings! If you've read this far, I'm going to assume you've had to deal with this before, so I'm going to post the script here.

tell application id "com.figure53.qlab.3" to tell front workspace
  set cueTime to action elapsed of cue "1" -- change "1" to target your repeating full ring cue
if (cueTime mod 6.0) < 1.9 then -- 6.0 is the length of a full ring, and 1.9 is just before the ring-out: edit as necessary
   start cue "2.1" -- in this case, cue "2.1" is a quick (0.1s) fade out of the full ring
start cue "2.2" -- "2.2" is a cue with only the ring-out portion
  else
   start cue "2.3" -- cue 2.3 is a devamp cue, to stop the full ring cue when it completes
end if
end tell

So, the entire sequence in the QLab Cue List would look like:

sample QLab Cue List (click for full-size)

I'll have more from the theatre realm soon, so stay tuned!

Happy 2016, everybody!

I'm in tech for my next show at IRT, The mystery of Irma Vep - 1991's most produced play and longest-running show in Brazil! The show features some great organ music by composer/sound designer Lindsay Jones, so come on down and check it out if you're in the area. Recently, IRT's resident sound designer and I were talking about QLab, and he mentioned how it would be nice to have a simple way of exporting a cue sheet from QLab, to give to stage managers. I had been looking for a project, so I thought this sounded like an excellent test case for teaching myself some Applescript. And, lo and behold, it works!

Here's a link to the .scpt file, or you can copy/paste/compile your own:

-- Export a simple cue sheet from a QLab cue list

-- Jason Tuttle 

-- This script will export the cue number and name of all selected cues to a comma-delimited (.csv) text file,

-- which can be imported to any common spreadsheet program (Excel, Numbers, OpenOffice, etc...)

tell application id "com.figure53.qlab.3" to tell front workspace

  	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ASCII character 44 --comma, change to 9 for tab-delim

  	global oneCue

  	set theFile to choose file name with prompt "Name the .csv file" default name "New Cue Sheet.csv"

  	set referenceNumber to open for access theFile with write permission

  	set header to {"Cue #", "Cue Name", "Notes" & return} as string

  	write header to theFile starting at eof

  	repeat with eachCue in (selected as list)

    		try --if you want to expand the number of fields to export, do so here

      			set thisqnumber to q number of eachCue

      			set thisqname to q list name of eachCue

      			set thisqnotes to notes of eachCue

      			set oneCue to {thisqnumber, thisqname, thisqnotes} as string --you'd have to add extra fields here

      write (oneCue & return) as text to theFile starting at eof

      on error error_message number error_number --just in case something goes wrong...

      display dialog "Error" & error_number & ": " & error_message buttons {"OK"} default button 1

    end try

  end repeat

  	close access referenceNumber --close access to the file we opened

  	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "" ---reset to nothing

end tell

So, there it is. It's pretty simple, but it works. If you download or use it, let me know. If you make improvements on it, let me know. If you have a feature request, let me know that, too, and I'll see if I can make it happen.

Happy scripting!

Hello?

Scripting!