Dpoirier
Fractal Fanatic
Hey forumites! I have a vague question some of you might be able to help me with.
I'm looking for a simple, light tool (and file format) to be able to play back 4-tracks of music. And, as a non negligible complexity, I need to be able to route the outputs separately.
I know that a laptop with a DAW is the obvious choice, but (a) it's far from "simple and light", and (b) I am really worried about the higher risk of something going wrong during a gig.
Now for the background: one of my musical projects consists of two other musicians, myself, and pre-recorded tracks. We've got the whole thing finely tuned and it works like a charm. The issue is that the audio tracks include a three bar leading click (for the drummer to sync his metronome to). After the leading click, the whole thing sounds phenomenal. But the click is of course audible to the audience, and it's really annoying. Worse still when there's a tempo change mid-song and a second click becomes audible in the middle of the performance. So the "ideal world" desire is to have the click on a separate track and only in the musicians in-ears. Currently, our audio tracks are mp3 (including the clicks).
Of course I could bring my laptop and have the audio and click tracks routed the way I need it into two separate sub-mixes (one for the FOH without the click, and one with everything including the click to the in-ears). But I shudder at the thought of dependency on a laptop, Cubase, project files, audio routing, sound card, and every other bit that could fail or go missing.
So, is there anything simpler that any of you can suggest? Surely this isn't a unique problem and I'm sure many people use tracks... Is there such a thing as an mp3 player that can sync-play two stereo mp3s? Or some other creative workaround?
I'm looking for a simple, light tool (and file format) to be able to play back 4-tracks of music. And, as a non negligible complexity, I need to be able to route the outputs separately.
I know that a laptop with a DAW is the obvious choice, but (a) it's far from "simple and light", and (b) I am really worried about the higher risk of something going wrong during a gig.
Now for the background: one of my musical projects consists of two other musicians, myself, and pre-recorded tracks. We've got the whole thing finely tuned and it works like a charm. The issue is that the audio tracks include a three bar leading click (for the drummer to sync his metronome to). After the leading click, the whole thing sounds phenomenal. But the click is of course audible to the audience, and it's really annoying. Worse still when there's a tempo change mid-song and a second click becomes audible in the middle of the performance. So the "ideal world" desire is to have the click on a separate track and only in the musicians in-ears. Currently, our audio tracks are mp3 (including the clicks).
Of course I could bring my laptop and have the audio and click tracks routed the way I need it into two separate sub-mixes (one for the FOH without the click, and one with everything including the click to the in-ears). But I shudder at the thought of dependency on a laptop, Cubase, project files, audio routing, sound card, and every other bit that could fail or go missing.
So, is there anything simpler that any of you can suggest? Surely this isn't a unique problem and I'm sure many people use tracks... Is there such a thing as an mp3 player that can sync-play two stereo mp3s? Or some other creative workaround?
