Tips & Tricks

Using Multiple Media Players To Get Through That Time-Out With Ease!

“Drag & Drop your selections for an upcoming time-out or stoppage”

For those of you who are wondering what we could do to make Sound Director even faster and easier for you, we’ve done something that can and will make it easier to get through that time out, inning break, or stoppage of play with ease.

In most sports and live events, there are natural stoppages when a team traditionally runs promotions, commercials, and PA reads. In basketball we have time-outs and quarter breaks. In baseball there’s inning breaks. In football there are changes of possession and quarter breaks. In hockey you’re loaded with stoppages and of course period breaks.

Something you will first notice in Sound Director is that there is a fairly large area positioned on the right hand side of the screen. This area is where the media players in Sound Director are placed as selections are played or queued to play.  The idea is simple – we wanted an easy way to have certain music selections ready to play for an upcoming time-out. For us, a typical time out would mean an instrumental bed of music playing under a PA read, possibly followed by an on-court promotion whereby I would need anywhere from 4-6 (or more) selections at my disposal (i.e., funny promotional music, drum roll, sound effects, organ tah dahs, etc.), then end with a music bumper.  

The benefit to having all that space available is that you can drag and drop your various selections into the media queue area at any time while the game is going on in preparation for your next stoppage. Then, you just go down through and play each selection without having to change screens (Reminder: you can always program those selections in which you play consistently game after game right on your keyboard for even quicker access). Depending on your screen resolution and button sizes, you can have upwards of 10 media player selections visible and ready to play!

In the past, I would have many of these selections on different screens, and although I think I get around my screens pretty fast, it just wasn’t as easy as it could be to click on a selection and then quickly find the next, etc. You may find yourself in a similar circumstance – no matter what sport you work in. Sometimes “quick” just isn’t “quick enough”.  

Speaking of “quick”, in our more advance version of Sound Director we have Quick Tabs.  One of the tab groups can be utilized as Media Player tabs.  This gives you the ability to add even more selections and group them on different tabs.  This is a great way to organize your whole game day presentation for each game.  You could label the different tabs by quarter, by promotions, by music, etc. to make your job even easier!

What this did was allow me to get even faster, be more prepared for our promotions, and even think a bit more creatively, which isn’t a bad thing!