Show HN: Automate your studio – mute a mixer channel to turn your PTZ camera

The X32 is a series of audio mixing consoles[1] to combine the signals from multiple microphones and/or musical instruments to a venue's speakers or to a recording/streaming apparatus.

In this case, there are multiple points of interest on the stage which are sometimes used, and sometimes not. When an area of the stage is unused, the microphone(s) at that location are manually muted to eliminate unwanted noise. The remaining unmuted microphone is at a location of interest, which is also the logical thing for a motorized camera to point toward and zoom onto at that moment.

This project uses the muted/unmuted states of microphones as a cue for camera movement, although it takes some upfront work to set it up. It also could cause trouble for looser or more improvisational shows where such rigidity might actually get in the way.

[1]: https://www.behringer.com/series.html?category=R-BEHRINGER-X...

That's kind of the challenge of using jargon and industry specific acronyms. Creators should use plain language to describe their product as much as they can, even if your intended audience should be aware, it is a good way to practice improving your communication skills.

If I'd have, I might have not developed this:)) It's very hard to define what this thing is, and it's even harder to search for it. (In both my and this case). Also that name is very weird for me as a non-french:)

I have started to mess around with Chataigne, it seems promising, but this far I'm getting stuck at trivial steps (matching a regexp, converting a "contains" to bool, etc). We'll see how I progress with support:)

But that guy is clearly brilliant just like Chataigne.

Thanks for mentioning!

This looks similar to https://ossia.io/

Interestingly, both seem to be projects from French developers, and they look very similar.

Good job, thanks for sharing!

Thank you so much.

If I understand your prior-art question, I think there is a few: - the OSC protocol for audio gear and some other studio equipment. - In the lighting world I heard DMX is king - OBS has a very extensive Websocket client

For PTZ cameras I'm not sure, our old PTZ camera needs HTTP GET-s to weird urls (RPC).

Thanks again for starring!

For my tool i don't really think that's possible as of now, through OSC you don't get the audio signal (afaik), maximum the level at some precision.

Also general audio stuff is from 20-20khz, so you don't really have headroom to super(or sub?) impose another signal into it frequency wise, as it would be audible. (Unless you sacrifice some parts with a high/low cut on the original signal.)

Although you could have 48khz sampling rate on most audio gear, so you could do time-multiplexing if you are really desperate, but then all signals need processing before becoming useful/noiseless.

About the cable sheath, of course you can do anything with custom circuits, but general audio stuff will not help you in that as far as i know.

If you ask it because of controlling the cam with a mute status felt out-of-place for you, then: no it's not wasting any channels. As someone above already explained very precisely above, the thing is you don't want to have live and unused microphones on your setup, due to feedback, extra noise, etc.

So if the speaker is speaking, the band is muted, if the band is playing the speaker is muted. And this can be used (in our case, not always for everyone), to track where the event is happening, and the camera can turn at the right position based on this. Therefore we, in our usecase could eliminate an extra step for someone to manage the camera by hand.

By the way, many consoles have extra buttons/knobs that are assignable to random stuff, so through OSC i could query their states as well and i could set up camera movement with those as well if i wanted to.

You can’t use it as native MIDI in GarageBand?

Hi! Yes, as far as I see it is a control board, that needs someone to operate it. And thats the reason, my tool automates the camera movement.

By the way, we do have a custom keyboard as well, which is basically a separation of concerns/simplified interface for OBS, which is intimidating for most of our crew. But they can handle 10 buttons with nice labels.

For example they have one button that toggles the camera view and the projector view.

Also I scripted OBS to manage camera positions with the scene "Pulpit", "Stage", "Pulpit wide", "Sitting": so they can manually override the automated thing in 1% of the time, but 99% of the time the automation is enough.

Also I have scripted OBS to manage the stream lifecycle based on which scene is active. So: - they can bring up the "Starting soon" scene that would start streaming but not the recording - they can bring up the "Break" scene that would pause(!) the recording but not the stream - they can bring up the "Finished" scene that would stop all with a nice fade out and "thank you for joining" text, etc.

So a control pad can work together with this tool.