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My wife and I play gigs at retirement homes and hospitals. Throughout the year, we play monthly programs. Each Program has 15-17 songs and each pgm is different. All songs are in mp3 format, but may have come from different sources although the main source is biab/rb. About 2/3rds of the songs are sing-a-alongs. All was going ok until we went to win 7. We need a player that can play a single song and then stop to talk the audience. We play the songs in order and each filename begins with the song order number (i.e. 01 Misty). My initial problem was to find an mp3 player with external buttons to push for play, pause, advance, back, and also to select a specific program folder, which I guess most refer to as "Playlists" now. Hey, I'm an old guy, ok? We have been using a TASCAM mp3 music and voice trainer, MP-VT-1. My new desktop will not recognize it and Tascam tech support says that it works fine with Win 7 64 bit. Sometimes is will recognize it but shows "no files". This unit doesn't have much memory but it has enough for our stuff. My netbook will not recognize it either. Well, obviously we have to be able to add and delete songs. When we started at had to put eveything on CD's and play from a boombox. I don't want to go back there. Trying to find a player that will play a single song is really tough. Many people don't even understand why someone would even want one. I just tried a Sansa Fuze 4gb, but it's output volume is not enough for our monitor. I've been considering a used/refurbished ipod, but I'm not sure if it will play just a single song from a list. Matt suggested a zoom h2 once, but it looks like that is a recording device. However, if it would meet our needs, I would gladly buy one. Seems like some of the older equip. would play single songs, but it's not available now and you take a chance getting a used one. I would like to say that price is no object, but I think we'll have to keep our cost to around $200. I guess that we could use our netbook, but we worry about the Alzheimers' patients tapping the keyboard while we are playing. The caregivers aren't always able to stop them and we have had music taken from our stands while we were playing. Can I call that distracting?  Oh well, we play for free so not too many complaints from the management. I guess I could buy another mv-pt1 or something similar but I'm really at a loss as to what to do at this point. We are using the tascam for a gig at church tomorrow, we really need to get our July pgm squared away now. Please help us out with some ideas/suggestions/comments. Thanks so much. Stan
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How about using a cheap 2nd hand ipad ? Even some cell phones have this facility.
Just a thought
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I might be way off base and to simple with my suggestion... would WinAmp not work for this purpose? Just trying to help... not saying that I know anything at all Cheers, Mike
Cheers, Mike My Music * Asus ROG Strix G15CF 32 GB DDR4 4TB HDD + 1 TB SSD NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 8GB Win 11 AKAI EIE PRO Sound Interface. BIAB/RB 2024 UltraPak Build - Latest
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To be honest, and not meaning to sound mean at all, but this is all user education. Just sit down and learn how to use your equipment. Spend some time and play with different software until you find what you want. Nothing is automatic. This is not particularly advanced stuff you are looking for here.
Most MP3 players start and stop with the space bar. You may have to configure that quick key, but no matter what, this is computer basic basics here. Is it a huge deal to click a start and stop button with a mouse? At some point a human has to tell a computer what to do. Even if you go iPod Nano, you will be starting and stopping with some kind of human interfacing.
And also, "old" has nothing to do with it. I have customers in their mid 70s who have 3-4 computers networked in their house. One is 81 and he is always looking to learn more.
One tip I would offer is to normalize your songs. You said they came "from all over" and I will take a stab that some are recorded hotter than others. Once you have that done, build your set lists (playlist in Windows Media Player lingo) and look into some USB foot pedals to start and stop if clicking the mouse or tapping the space bar is a big deal.
I am also curious about what you meant by "but it's output volume is not enough for our monitor". Don't you have power amps driving your monitors that have volume controls on them?
As far as the audience messing with your stuff, I understand that can be a problem. However, if you set up something like baby gate kind of stuff to make a definite "stage" area, people will not be likely to cross it. Most of the solo and duo type acts I know carry railing in their vans for that very reason. Also, very few of them take laptops out. Of the 5 or 6 I know who do acts like that, they use either an iTouch or a Nano. With the amount of storage on those devices, they never run out of music.
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Thanks for your comments. I'm not sure what you mean by"Also, very few of them take laptops out" If I'm hitting the space bar as a toggle, wouldn't that be on a keyboard, i.e. my netbook or laptop? I do have a Sony Walkman, but for me, it's just too tiny to use to manage songs on a gig. We use either a roland cm-30 or roland micro cube on our gigs. I have no experience with any Apple products hence my ignorance.
Stan
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I use Media Monkey Player, It's free and beats WMP all hollow. It allow many features that WMP doesn't even have, plus a nice intuitive tag editor.
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Quote:
I'm not sure what you mean by "Also, very few of them take laptops out"
In THEIR case, they use either an iTouch or an iPod Nano rather than taking their expensive laptops to a gig to be stolen while they load out. That requires them to start and stop every song by hand. For you, you would have playlists compiled running on a laptop and use the spacebar to toggle the MP3 player on and off.
Look into VLC as your player. Someone mentioned Winamp. (Was that Mac that said that?)
Personally I totally HATE Microsoft Media Player, because of the overall philosophy of Microsoft and how they want to take over the world. All of that "Should I download album art" crap.... I can't think of even one situation where I'd give any sort of a damn about album art. Just play my song. Without all of those ridiculous "Visualizations" dancing all over my screen. And don't show me different "skins". Just play my song. Yet Micro$oft has all that extraneous garbage ON by default and you have to dig through many screens to find out how to turn them off. Just like how Windows comes THEIR way and you have to tweak. I believe software should always come plain vanilla and you customize it. But they didn't ask me, so.....
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The laptop with the jukebox feature in BIAB has worked great for me. I would not even consider an mp3 player at this stage of my single act giging life, I too am an old guy.  Not sayng it's right for everyone but it suits me and my act to a "tee". Good luck,
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Oh yeah. I agree about WMP. I don't care about all the album stuff either. I'm not adverse to trying an itouch or nano either. If I put out the bucks for one, I just want to make sure that I can play a single song on it. Sounds like, from what you are saying, they have to both start (that's a given) and stop (might be hard while I'm holding my trumpet) each song?
If I go the computer route, what I would have on the screen is the list of our pgm songs in order. All I would have to do is double click on the song. I do that all the time using wmp but I'm not adverse to using something else. Actually my ASUS netbook is pretty portable, but something like an itouch is even easier to transport. The mv-pt2 is about the size of a point and shoot digital camera. They have a guitar trainer/recorder for $92, GB-10 that might work. It uses an SD card and/or the other sdhc card that goes to 32gb. I appreciate your comments.
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The answer is right under your noses.RealBand with the Juke Box. Couldn't be better or simpler.
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You mentioned NetBook, not Notebook. Which version of Windows 7 are you running? A number of NetBooks run Win7 Basic, which might be the root of your problem. I doubt many vendors test with Basic. Just a thought.
John Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 12TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 12TB SATA BB2026/UMC204HD&404HD/Casios/Cakewalk/Reaper/Studio One/Notion/Dorico/Noteworthy/NI/Halion/IK http://www.sus4chord.com (under rehosting/construction)
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Quote:
The answer is right under your noses.RealBand with the Juke Box. Couldn't be better or simpler.
Hi Stan
I was just about to suggest basically the same thing.
Don S.
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Quote:
You mentioned NetBook, not Notebook. Which version of Windows 7 are you running? A number of NetBooks run Win7 Basic, which might be the root of your problem. I doubt many vendors test with Basic. Just a thought.
You are probably correct about that John. It is basic, but so far it seems to handle stuff okay except for the tascam.. If I were to start using it for gigs, I might have to go to Home Premium. However, my desktop is Home premium 64 bit and it's the one that caused me the major problem which I didn't mention. I was getting a BSOD (blue screen of death) about every 8-10 minutes. I think it was due to driver that was downloaded to try and connect with the tascam player, but it didn't come from tascam-probably MS. I was just going to do a clean install, but my wife thought I should call Nerds On Call. Being lazy and not wanting to disconnect everything I had a guy come to my home and he was here for an hour and a half. He told me that I had to take it in so they could do a complete diagnostic on the memory and drive and find the bad driver. 6 days later I get a call saying they couldn't find it and they needed to do a clean install and that would be $179. I just went and got it and did the clean install myself. No more BSOD. I haven't tried hooking up the tascam to it again though and that's why I'm looking for alternatives. Even if I get the netbook going with the right software, I'll still have to get the files on it from the desktop. I've never transferred files over our network so I'll have to learn how to do that, too. This has gotten out of hand. Maybe I should retire.
Stan
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Stan I understand totally what you need for playing back your backings. I do exactly the same thing and I also needed a player that would play ONE song and then stop - not carry on through the playlist. I am usually busy playing keyboard and when the backing stops I may carry on playing, so have no inclination or indeed have any hands free to stop the next cued song from playing. Two things work for me and those are a laptop and my ASUS Transformer eePad running Android. Using a normal laptop was a bit bulky but I now have a 10" Acer Netbook and this and Windows Media Player does work quite well. The eePad is 10.1" and can play one song at a time or a continuous playlist. It can also display a pdf leadsheet which is also useful and is compact enough to sit on my music stand. When I lead worship, I usually use both the netbook and the eePad, the netbook playing backings and the eePad showing leadsheets. The only problem with computer/cd backing tracks is that they are usually so inflexible - especially for leading praise and worship. If you want to deviate from the playlist or jump into the chorus of another song entirely you can not. That is why if I know there is a chance that my playlist could disintegrate mid session then I will use my Roland E-60 Workstation with its built-in accompaniment. If I am feeling particularly energetic and know I will have a reasonable set-up time I use a laptop, eePad and the E-60. The laptop will be running Chainer with TruePianos and two or three instances of Nexus for a wash of low level pads controlled by the E-60. Instead of Chainer I can use Steinberg's V-Stack which allows the same layering and stacking of VSTi's but to separate outputs on my Fast Track Ultra 8R. When it all works together it is quite impressive and is stunning enough to make the hairs stand up on my neck!! When I know it sounds good I am able to put some 'extra' into my vocals - then I don't want to stop, I could play all day. Kevin
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My Lenovo lappy is really small & thin BUT is able to use RB with the jukeBox and the conductor.
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Kevin & Silvertones. I've come to realize that you guys are right. I have to change from what I've been doing to gain more flexibility. I can use my netbook even with Win 7 Basic. It's just missing Windows Media Center and I don't care about that anyway. Before I put the songs on the Tascam, we practiced from file lists on the desktop anyway. The netbook has a built in mouse pad so I won't have to bring a mouse on the gigs although I do have a little wireless mouse to use. I'm not sure which pgm I'll use for playlists. I think a saw a free one on Cnet yesterday called Aimp? I don't want anything fancy that looks for album art, etc. I may just put the current program on the desktop screen and work from there. At least I don't have to spend anymore money.
Kevin: I know what you mean about using the backups and lack of flexibility. I would rather play with live musicians, but it's so hard to get everyone together to rehearse since they all have the work and families. At least we can be ready and prepared using the canned stuff. Now we are off the church to play a couple of tunes. Thanks for everybody's help.
Stan
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John I really need to look at the Conductor and its method of control. If I could control it with my Behringer FCB 1010 it would be ideal. Kevin
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UPDATE: Hey Guys! I found this great audio player program for gigs-----AIMP. It's easy to learn and has lots of features. You can load another song even if you are already in a playlist. It can read many audio file formats and has an equalizer built in. It sounds better than WMA to me through my ua-4fx sound module. Lots of flexibility. If you don't like it, you're not out anything because it's FREE. Get it here: http://download.cnet.com/AIMP/3000-2139_4-10967793.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;popI'm going to us it with my Asus Eee netbook into either a Roland cm-30 cube or micro cube. Thanks for getting me on the right track and away from using a player from the olden days! Stan
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