Experimentation, innovation, and many plugins.

I had a call this summer that went something along the lines of: "I've heard you're good at putting stuff together and making it all talk to each other". So for the last few months I've been lucky enough to be working on a massive project that really let people experiment, it welcomed and encouraged innovation - which is a very rare thing at the moment!

My job was to work out how to get control messages from QLab, ProTools, BlackTrax, and a custom GUI into, and out, of an SD7 and then into the correct one of three surround processors. Actually there were more signals than that - everything was redundant and automatically switched from master to redundant.

Unfortunately the production went bust last week. So I've now fallen off the edge of what was a very busy cliff and back to looking for work...

However, it wasn't a total waste of time. I now have a load more knowledge of writing Q-SYS plugins. I've even written myself a .qplug compiler that allows me to write plugins in a modular fashion and also allows me to include my own libraries.

So over the next few weeks I plan to formalise my plugin collection, re-write them, and document them here. Plugins that are basically ready for real-world testing include:

• UDP matrix
• OSC I/O
• OSC translator
• A suite of plugins for time-based cue triggering
• Object based surround processor
• Perhaps an update to my Art-Net plugin

Stay tuned...