HD24 live playback

[Malc180s]

Hey all

I'm looking to playback 24 tracks of audio live - I'll be controlling it from on stage. It seems the HD24 is the best bet, can anyone explain exactly how I'd go about using it?
I'll be hiring one, and before I do I'd like to know how it actually works.

The playback will consist of 15 or so songs which will change every night, so I'd want to record the 20 songs we'll be selecting from into it before the shows, then effectively 'write a different playlist' in the Hd24 every night. Is this possible?

I also read this thread Alesis HD24 Sequential Song Playback?
Could anyone confirm or deny his question? If it could just line itself up at the next song it would save me thinking about it, which can only be good!

Thanks

[Lucky]

Hi there,
I use an HD24 as a playback-machine in my band..

You can create several projects, in each project you can create individual songs.

This is the main advantage to other harddisc-recorders, because of this structure you can change the song-order without any problems every time you have to..
When you play the show, you just have to press the up-button to select the next song.

Cheers, Lucky

edit: haha, also my first post on gearslutz

[Malc180s]

Ok, that just about makes sense!

Does this mean I could record the 24 tracks of audio from protools into the HD24, then create several 'projects' using the same regions of audio to create different running orders? That is, does the audio sit on the hard-disk waiting to be accessed by whatever project requires it, or does the audio sit inside a project, making it unaccessable from other projects?

I'm just not sure how the machine does it's workings, and it'd be handy to know.

cheers

[Lucky]

I try to describe it a bit better:
A project is the main folder, in that project are lying the song-folders, this song folder contain the audio-files of this specific song.
That means you create a new song first, and then record the audio of this song in it. After you did that with all your songs you can easyly change the order of the songs, they have a name and a number.
I am shure it is not possible to use one audio-file in different songs or projects, you then have to copy it manually.
It is not like a DAW where you have an audio-pool and import that into a song, you have to record your song-playbacks individually into seperate
"songs-folders" of the HD24

cheers, Lucky

[synthoid]

just to add a bit to what Lucky has written. I've also used an HD24 for backing track playback. There are a couple different ways to organize things.

1) maintain your shows (different play list orders) in something like PT and record one big HD24 song for each show. You could store several shows on the HD24's drives, as different songs. In this case the playback is dead simple: push PLAY to go, maybe PAUSE and PLAY to stop and start between songs.

2) record each of your songs as separate songs in the HD24, in a single project. this is the most flexible method and the most intuitive, but it makes playback a little more complicated, because someone has to call up each song by using the SONG SEL menu and buttons on the HD24 before each song. The name of the song is displayed when it is selected, so as long as the operator is on the ball and practices moving around the panel it's fine.

The 8 locator buttons on the front panel can be assigned to up to 8 song positions with method #1, for what that's worth. I use that when doing sound checks or rehearsals to visit specific songs. If you want these locators available for all songs you can break the show into 8-song projects so that you'll have panel locator buttons for all the songs in the show.

If timecode becomes a consideration, method #1 makes it easiest to generate show-relative timecode. The MIDI OUT will give you timecode relative to the start of the show, and you can program in timecode starting points for each of the 8-song segments if you break them up. The second method doesn't give you any obvious way of generating timecode relative to the show -- it is more natural to generate timecode relative to each song with the second method.

I park the deck next to the FOH console and have someone else operate it. Makes for easier cabling as well. I've seen folks using it from the stage too though.

hth,

-synthoid