Sound Project Help

[techracer74]

Greetings all. I am involved in quite an elaborate Haloween display for my city and have been tasked the job of sound coordinator. I have quite a bit of computer/server/PC experience along w/ sound/audio/home theater experience so I am not new to this by any means, just not much experience at them both together.

The task at hand is to have a PC play up to 4 or 5 different sounds/tracks/clips at the same time via multiple sound cards.

So my question to all of you is: do you know if this is possible? I really don't want to have 4 or 5 PC's all strung about the "graveyard" and would like to do it with 1 PC running all of the sound.

My proposed box is:
AMD Athlon 1.8 XP
1gig ram
Sound Blaster Audigy, SB Live, misc other SB cards

Any help is much appreciated by all of us involved.


Bryan

 

[micker377]

Interesting question, I don't know if the IRQ conflicts can be sorted out. Most audio cards use the same interupts by default. I know you can't use on-board sound and a card both. You can have multiple modems and video cards, but they are designed to look for and use available IRQ's. Let us know how you come out!

 

[dakota81]

I would think you could put each sound effect into a separate channel of a 5 channel audio file. This is something that is simple with two speakers and using any basic wave editor. I've never dealt with 5 channel stuff myself, but it sounds feasable.

 

[Nelviticus]

If you want to prepare your sounds beforehand and just let them play then something like the freeware Audacity will be enough for the job. It can combine several input tracks into a single mixed output file.

If you want to do it 'ad hoc' then I don't know. Can you not have several instances of your audio player running at the same time and just let the card handle the mixing? This is the way I've always assumed it works - my old Amiga could do it with two channels at once so I suspect that modern PCs can do it with several. I'm not able to test it at work though.

Nelviticus

 

[norty303]

I think that maybe the best way if you only need the sounds in mono would be to route each of the sounds to a different output on a 5.1 card. Then connect each output to a 6+ channel desk which has the option of sub-group outs or a direct-out from each channel (a Mackie 24:8:2 springs to mind).

Then you will need to decide (depending on distance) whether to retain all the amps locally and have long speaker runs to the PA (which can cause problems due to impedance increases) or to have amps and speakers or active powered speakers in each location and use line boosters to retain the level. Keeping them local means that you can get away with 3 amps (6 mono channels) but it all depends on the distances involved. Running everything through the desk means you can also use realtime fx on the send/returns or as inserts.

As far as software is concerned i can recommend Emagic Logic 5.5 (PC) whaich can process the surround data and has very good built in VST fx. Then you have the choice of either recording the track with timing or loading all of your sounds into the VST sampler that comes with Logic and mapping each of them to a key on a midi keyboard so that you can trigger them at will.

Sounds like fun

 

[techracer74]

Thanks for all the help. I'm still researching how we are goin got go about this but there are some very good suggestion s here. Just wasn't wanting to do some heavy audio mixing but then again nothing that's worth doing is ever easy.


Thanks again,

Bryan

 

[audiopro]

Check out Winamp - You can have numerous instances of it, each playing a different audio files. You would be limited only by your computer's resources.
Keith

 

[JimInKS]

Just curious why you need the computer to do this.
Are you doing more than just making sounds?

I would consider recording 5 cds, getting 5 cheapo cd players, and just setting them on auto repeat.

Thats what we do for our music on hold for our telephone system.

Anyway - let us know how this comes out as you've peaked my curiosity.

 

[techracer74]

I was just trying to get a bit more elegant solution then doing all the seperate CD players. And I have the PC(s) to do it and not that many portable cd players. I need a total of 5 "zones" if you will, 5 seperate sound files playing when triggered by a seperate device, which is a topic not for this forum but i've got that figured out ;-)

Thanks again guys


Bryan

 

[norty303]

I'd be triggering them by a midi device myself, so the software sampler would still be my favorite choice.