Playing files sequentially
(sorry - I accidentally posted this first in 'songs,' and I might get more useful answers here in this topic...)
My band has used Cakewalk files for years to add some midi backup to our rock band's sound - horns, percussion and strings mostly on certain songs. Been doing it for many years, and we're happy to be using Sonar Producer (I have 8 and my singer uses X1) these days. But there's always a delay while we go over to the computer, find the right file, load it and start it up. We’ve been having extra problems this summer with all of the outdoor shows we’ve done – looking at a computer screen in bright sunshine during an already slow process isn’t helping us keep the show moving at all.
Making them into audio files (whatever kind..) and then just playing them is an option we've discussed many times. We've turned most of our midis into audio files and we carry an MP3 player with us as a backup device to play them with, just in case the computer crashes.
We are reluctant to do that as our primary device because we make a big deal out of "Bruce the Computer" on stage, and we feel that a properly displayed midi file which the audience can see going by in Cakewalk makes a much better show than Windows media player. It also helps us convince people that Bruce is doing things that most computers can’t, which he is. All of our displays are configured specifically for the audience to see.
I'd like very much to automate this a little so that after a file is finished playing, all it will take is a single keystroke to find/load/startup the next file according to some kind of pre-set choices (depending on our set list that night). Of course the obvious solution is to put all of the files into one long midi file and start and stop it as needed, but this is totally impossible - we've been making these files for over 10 years, and every file is made with different instruments, different volume and velocity settings, different track and channel assignments, different everything made by different people! It would take me years to get them all into one useable midi file.
All of the help files I can find with 'playlist' in them refer to Publisher, which of course isn't any help at all. And I can find no reference to 'jukebox.'
Since Cakewalk can’t seem to do it, I’m kind of hoping for a non-Cakewalk idea/solution - something along the lines of a Windows macro that would fire up and play the next file in a list with a single button push.
Does anybody have any ideas?