Often in corporate events, the big event moments (CEO walk-up, award winner, big product reveal etc.) are accompanied by big production moments. Confetti cannons, ballyhoos, kabuki drops, you name it! And usually, there’s a big audio sting. But what happens when the perfect song has been chosen and the AV team has the Spotify playlist, only for the song to start from the slow intro (not the exciting upbeat second chorus you had in mind), or worse still, wasn’t downloaded and buffers right at the moment you needed it to play? We go to great lengths to make sure it doesn’t happen. When a client hands us a Spotify playlist, we always check if any of the songs are for an important show moment. For anything that is, we download a high-resolution version of the file, then load it into a software package called QLab that utilises the native Apple Mac audio engine to reliably play all the key moments of your show. This software cleverly overrides Mac settings to ensure there are no obnoxious system popup sounds or automatic updates taking place at the worst time as well.
Beyond QLab’s rock solid playback engine, it has a number of features that make it ideal for playing stings. We can take the waveform of a song, and set the start point to be anywhere within the music, ensuring that the big moment is accompanied by the exact upbeat part of the song it was intended to be. Better yet, because the whole track is loaded in and referenced by the software, we can even specify multiple points of a track that we might want to trigger from. And making last minute changes doesn’t require re-rendering or re-encoding, we can simply select a new in/out point.
Using this approach for key moments in the show, ensures that we never have awkward moments due to that track just not playing, or the wrong one being cued. Spotify is a great tool for you to supply us with a curated background music playlist, but when the big moment comes around, there are better tools to make sure it goes off with a bang.
Learn more about our approach to delivering flawless corporate events here.
