Sound Item Play Modifiers

Play Modifiers group

Each Sound Item has the following optional Play Modifiers attributes. These apply in both regular play or sequence play mode.

Setting Play Modifiers

• Loop Play - If the Loop Play checkbox is checked, when a sound is played it will play in a continous loop until the Stop button is clicked. This will effectively interrupt sequence play. Delay and Multiple Play attributes are disabled when loop is used.
• Preemptive - When checked, Play causes all other playing sounds to suspend until this sound ends. (useful for injecting announcements into a music program). In the Options dialog, you can cause all Preemptive plays to have a standard Pre and Post Delay.
• Pre-Delay - When checked, adds a delay BEFORE the sound begins playing. Click the Pre-Delay Time Edit button to set the delay time in minutes, seconds and milli-seconds (thousandths of a second, 100 milli-seconds equals one tenth of a second). Delays are useful for separating sounds for Multiple Play or when automating sounds.
• Post-Delay - When checked, adds a delay AFTER the sound finishes playing. Click the Post-Delay Time Edit button to set the delay time.
• Multiple Play - If the Multiple checkbox is checked, the sound play will repeat the specified number of times. Example, a two (2) implies play it twice.
• Restore original volume on replay - When checked, each time the sound is replayed with Multi-Play, the volume is reset to the original Sound Item volume. Useful if Fade markers change the volume during play.
• Use DirectX  - Indicates that the DirectX audio driver should be used when playing this Sound Item. When unchecked, the Media Player driver is used. Only available for Wav files.
• Output Group  - Sets Output Group which determines which device channel(s) the Sound Item plays on. An Output Group can contain multiple devices.
• Loop Seamless  - Plays the Sound Item in a loop using DirectX. Overrides the basic Loop function above and is often a tighter loop. The Pre-Delay happens once before entering the play loop. Once sound looping starts, no further delays are used.

Interrupting the Sound Program with PA Announcements

A common question we get is "How can I interrupt my sound program to make a PA announcement?"

Sound Mill does not have the capability to use a LIVE microphone feed at this time. However, you could just pause all sounds in Sound Mill and use the microphone with Windows audio device capabilites or swap to some other audio program.

If you have a pre-recorded announcement, you can achieve this as follows.

Announcement Setup

1.  Record the announcement (ex. Announcement1.mp3) and add it to the sound list as a sound item.
2.  In the Announcement1 Play Modifers, check the Preemptive checkbox.
3.  Make sure you have set the program to play Concurrent Sounds (on the Behavior menu).

Now during performance, when you want to play the announcement, just select the Announcement1 sound item and click the Play button. Any sound items currently playing will be paused while the announcement plays. When the announcement finishes, the paused sounds will resume.

If you need to send the announcement to multiple zones in your venue (ex. Lobby and main performance hall), you need to use the Output Groups capabilies. Create an Output Group that includes the needed output channels of the soundcard. In the Announcement1 Play Modifers, check the Use DirectX checkbox and set the Output Group to the one you just set up. The audio file must be a Wav file to use Output Groups.