Any way to automate song lyrics with Showcase?

[littlespaceman]

First gig with Stadium tomorrow, and having migrated from Quad Cortex, combined with WIDI Flex wireless BT dongle and iPad with StageTraxx 3, I hoped it would be a really great one-stop solution.

So far it's about 'ok'; I appreciate it is an early release of Showcase, and it clearly has a lot of potential, but can be a bit limited at present.

One thing I'd like to ask you all is do you have any clever ways of automating song lyrics in Showcase? At present my workaround is to select a backing song in the iPad/StageTraxx 3; ST3 on the iPad contains the same backing track as the Stadium, but it is used for lyrics only (all the tracks are muted in ST3). When you select the track in ST3, however, it sends a WIDI message to Stadium, to select the correct Showcase song. When you then press PLAY in ST3, it sends a MIDI message to Stadium to begin Showcase playback. So, to summarise, when you do this;

 

1) The muted song plays in ST3, but the lyrics highlights will scroll accordingly
2) The unmuted song plays in Showcase, along with all Preset/Snapshot selections etc

One problem, however is that on the Stadium, the Song Play MIDI message (CC51) is ALSO the Song Stop message, so it's easy to get out of sync, and start the song on the iPad, but stop it on the Stadium, etc, and vice versa. It would be much more helpful to have a different MIDI message for Song start and stop on the Stadium.

When it works though, it works ok, but it's prone to user-error, if you get out of sync controlling everything on the iPad.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to automate lyrics on a tablet? For example, assigning a hot-key command in Showcase to the tablet, instead of using MIDI messages from the tablet to Showcase?

[jpdennis]

@littlespaceman

 

Could you use a different midi channel for the iPad with StageTraxx 3?  I do not have StageTraxx so I am just spit-balling here.

[littlespaceman]

Hi, I'm not sure if understand how that might help?