Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

Steve Milner

Steve Milner

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Jan 10, 2011
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www.dcsoundop.com
Thought this was worth a mention if you haven't heard about it yet:

I've just been playing around with the new QLab 3 release, which is pretty cool, has iOS support and an interesting new layout.

The real party though is their release of QCart which is a cart player (as you would imagine). I've only been playing with it for a few minutes, but so far it's really exciting for one-off shows that don't require the in-depth programming of QLab.

**Correction** QCart has apparently been out since like late 2011, I've just been asleep at the wheel apparently on that one. I use QLab so often, but haven't kept up on their website at all for new releases. . . DOH!

Anyone have any real world reviews of QCart after using it for a while? I'm really liking it compared to what I've used before.

Figure 53 presents: QLab 3
 
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Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

The guys at Figure 53 came through with flying colors. The sent me a complimentary upgrade to v3 since I bought my v2 licenses so close to the release of v3 (literally within hours).

Of course my (first gen circa 2006) Mac Pro that I use in our large concert hall will have to be replaced in order to upgrade to v3 on that machine, which look slike it will cost about $300. Should only be a ~$3,300 upgrade :?~:-?~:???:.

Kudos to the guys at Figure 53 for being stand up guys.
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

I just noticed they have a license "rental" program.
Now the small theater that does a show using Qlab once a year doesn't have to shell out $750 for something that sits around most of the time not being used.
(especially after shelling out for SFX and every other "platform" required by your sound designers)
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

I've been using QCart for a couple of years now and it's certainly reliable. The only crashes have been during editing of carts, never in show. Q Cart is fairly nice as a cart player and with Qlab 3 out the door Qcart should be in line for some upgrades too. At the moment Soundboard | Ambrosia Software, Inc. is actually a somewhat nicer bit of software. The ability to trim and fade in/out the tracks without running out to a separate editor is really handy. Unfortunately Soundboard requires OS10.7 while I run 10.6.8 but I suspect that Qcart 2 will require 10.8 as the new Qlab does so time to update the OS.


Steve Milner said:
...
The real party though is their release of QCart which is a cart player (as you would imagine). I've only been playing with it for a few minutes, but so far it's really exciting for one-off shows that don't require the in-depth programming of QLab.

**Correction** QCart has apparently been out since like late 2011, I've just been asleep at the wheel apparently on that one. I use QLab so often, but haven't kept up on their website at all for new releases. . . DOH!

Anyone have any real world reviews of QCart after using it for a while? I'm really liking it compared to what I've used before.

Figure 53 presents: QLab 3
Click to expand...
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

I've not yet used QCart, but been thrilled with BlackCat's Soundbyte for years. I do a lot of variety shows and dance shows. It's a brilliant alternative to the IRP for events in my market. They've got a range of offerings, for your mac, ipad even a ios remote for controlling the app on your mac. Cheap, too.
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

David Nickerson said:
I've not yet used QCart, but been thrilled with BlackCat's Soundbyte for years. I do a lot of variety shows and dance shows. It's a brilliant alternative to the IRP for events in my market. They've got a range of offerings, for your mac, ipad even a ios remote for controlling the app on your mac. Cheap, too.
Click to expand...

Was Soundbyte what was used for that game show at the Hilton?

I've always used QLab for dance shows and theatre. I love it. When I was working at an install using it pretty much daily, I had QLab running redundantly on 2x Mac Minis. Andy Leviss makes a cool MIDI remote you can use with it too!
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

Justice C. Bigler said:
The guys at Figure 53 came through with flying colors. The sent me a complimentary upgrade to v3 since I bought my v2 licenses so close to the release of v3 (literally within hours).

Of course my (first gen circa 2006) Mac Pro that I use in our large concert hall will have to be replaced in order to upgrade to v3 on that machine, which look slike it will cost about $300. Should only be a ~$3,300 upgrade :?~:-?~:???:.

Kudos to the guys at Figure 53 for being stand up guys.
Click to expand...

I have went through this a few times lately.

Qlab will happily run on a new imac or mini and if you need rackmount or PCIe you can throw the mini in a sonnet xMac.

If you must have a mac pro, but your current one is working great and is powerful enough, you can try this. You will probably need an HD5770 gfx or better for this to be useful.

I just finished upgrading a few of my 1,1's with dual 5355's xeons (With a 1,1 to 2,1 EFI Flash and SMC reset), 5770 gfx, 16GB ram, and an SSD and/or 10K SATA drive and putting them to work on duties where I need PCIe slots (Video Injest/playout and/or huge multitrack projects with hardware I/O). They are still very useful, even after all these years. I hope to get another 2 years out of them and then look at my options.

Karl P
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

David Nickerson said:
I've not yet used QCart, but been thrilled with BlackCat's Soundbyte for years. I do a lot of variety shows and dance shows. It's a brilliant alternative to the IRP for events in my market. They've got a range of offerings, for your mac, ipad even a ios remote for controlling the app on your mac. Cheap, too.
Click to expand...

I've used soundbyte for probably 6 or 8 years now. Great program.

One of these days I'll get around to buying QCart for the much improved clip editing, but haven't gotten that far yet.
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

Karl Peterson said:
If you must have a mac pro, but your current one is working great and is powerful enough, you can try this. You will probably need an HD5770 gfx or better for this to be useful.

I just finished upgrading a few of my 1,1's with dual 5355's xeons (With a 1,1 to 2,1 EFI Flash and SMC reset), 5770 gfx, 16GB ram, and an SSD and/or 10K SATA drive and putting them to work on duties where I need PCIe slots (Video Injest/playout and/or huge multitrack projects with hardware I/O). They are still very useful, even after all these years. I hope to get another 2 years out of them and then look at my options.
Click to expand...

Hmmm...interesting. I got my TD to approve buying a new Mac Pro when they are released later this summer (hopefully) after being announced at WWDC in June. But I may have to do some research on this work around for installing 10.8. We have four of these first gen Mac Pros (all with dual core, dual proc Xenon CPUs), which otherwise work fine that we are reluctant to get rid of, and I just bought an additional 8GB of RAM for my audio workstation.

I have three of the Sonnet rack mount kits for the Mac Minis with the Super Drive caddy/shelf thing. They look like they will work fine for what I plan to do with them. I just had to get some external hard drives and a 4-way USB 3.0 hub.
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

Riley Casey said:
I've been using QCart for a couple of years now and it's certainly reliable. The only crashes have been during editing of carts, never in show. Q Cart is fairly nice as a cart player and with Qlab 3 out the door Qcart should be in line for some upgrades too. At the moment Soundboard | Ambrosia Software, Inc. is actually a somewhat nicer bit of software. The ability to trim and fade in/out the tracks without running out to a separate editor is really handy. Unfortunately Soundboard requires OS10.7 while I run 10.6.8 but I suspect that Qcart 2 will require 10.8 as the new Qlab does so time to update the OS.
Click to expand...

I'm using soundboard as well with excellent results. I use it triggered with a MIDI pedal for loops on stage. We use it in our kids theater with an iPad as a remote for sound and other more typical Cart stuff. And we use the straight ad version in another room. Very versatile, very easy to use, and very cost effective.
 
Re: Figure 53 releases QLab-3 and QCart which looks awesome!

Justice C. Bigler said:
Hmmm...interesting. I got my TD to approve buying a new Mac Pro when they are released later this summer (hopefully) after being announced at WWDC in June. But I may have to do some research on this work around for installing 10.8. We have four of these first gen Mac Pros (all with dual core, dual proc Xenon CPUs), which otherwise work fine that we are reluctant to get rid of, and I just bought an additional 8GB of RAM for my audio workstation.

I have three of the Sonnet rack mount kits for the Mac Minis with the Super Drive caddy/shelf thing. They look like they will work fine for what I plan to do with them. I just had to get some external hard drives and a 4-way USB 3.0 hub.
Click to expand...

A few notes,

If you decide to try it, and you can get 1 of your MP's upgraded to 10.8, you should be able to clone the drive(s) (Boot/Install & Primary Data) to duplicates and not have to step through it over and over again. It's relatively simple if you have an open drive bay, but if not you can use the IDE bus as noted in the linked guide. Again, the GFX concern is real.

Beware the USB3 hub. While most people point at them as an issue on Mac, I have had trouble with them all over the place. I would at least consider using a thunderbolt Raid and or something like the LaCie thunderbolt hub.

You may have already prototyped the usb3 solution and found it working for you, if so then great!

I'll be curious to see if we have a literal replacement for the MacPro this year, or a spiritual one. One side of me is looking forward to a new tower with drive bays and PCIe cards - the other side of me is half expecting to see a macpromini with integrated GFX, a <500GB SSD, some beefy processing, 10GB-T, USB and 4 or 5 thunderbolt ports. Any expansion (GFX, high speed disk, peripherals, etc) would be handled externally. If they followed this up with a 10.9 system-provided cross-system scheduler to allow apps to easily-ish distribute tasks over nodes on the 10GB network, it would be a new direction while not completely leaving existing users out in the cold.

After the better part of 4 or 5 years on a similar design footprint, I do expect to see something newish, if not a significant departure.

Karl "Interesting Times Ahead" P
 
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