It’s been quiet around here of late because I’ve spent pretty much all my spare time at rehearsals for a new play debuting in Brisbane titled The Last Of The Red Hot Irish Lovers which is probably best described as a light hearted drama.  I’ve been put in charge of the technical side of the show – mostly focussing on sound.  If you’re near Brisbane I strongly recommend you go see it, the opening night was tonight and there are shows Friday and Saturday from 7:30 and Sunday from 2pm as well as Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week from 7:30.  All at the MetroArts building in Adelaide street.  Tickets are available at the door or bookings can be made by contacting me (contact details are in the sidebar).  I think it’s about $15 a ticket or $10 concession.   If you need further info give me a yell.

One of the interesting challenges of doing the sound for the show has been how to manage the sound effects and ensure that they play instantly when required.  Waiting for the hard drive to spin up or caches to fill before the phone starts ringing really isn’t an option.  There’s also a fairly long list of sounds in use so it needs to be simple to select the sound and sounds sometimes follow in rapid succession and overlap.  I didn’t manage to find any software that could meet those requirements, so I wrote my own.

The software is a classic example of doing the absolute minimum that works.  A path to the folder full of sound files is hard coded, it only supports WAV and AIFF and sounds are fully loaded into RAM before they can begin playing (but they load into RAM when selected and then you play them in a separate action so the instant response requirement is met).  During the scene changes there are some long sounds which load (up to 5-6 minutes long for the final song during bows etc) and that can take some time to finish loading.  Instead of spawning a separate thread the software just blocks the UI thread and displays the spinning beachball of doom.  There’s plenty of time between sound effects for the loading to complete before the sound is needed – just train the operator to always cue up the sounds immediately after the last sound finishes.

I wound up writing the little app in Objective-C using the Cocoa libraries which was a very pleasant experience.  I’ve tinkered a little with Cocoa but done pretty much nothing with Objective-C before.  I particularly like the fact that I could code the system to provide just a single list of sounds and a single play button (thus only being able to play one sound at a time) then simply duplicate the list, button and sound controller instance in Interface Builder and instantly the app could play 2 sounds at once (I later added a 3rd list for a particularly problematic scene).

The system is working absolutely brilliantly.  I use iTunes for the music before the play starts and during intermission but otherwise everything is handled through this little app which is still running straight from Project Builder.  There is definitely something to be said for knowing the requirements for a project precisely and not wasting time on fluff that’s not needed.