Skip to content

CueCast Brings Data Management to a Digital Business

Share this Post:

If the recent presidential election taught us nothing else, it’s that data has replaced content as the king of media technology. No matter how good a show could potentially be, if you suddenly discover that the FOH console you were expecting to use for it is lying in pieces on the wrong end of a loading dock 2,000 miles away, it’s not the missing faders you’ll really be stressing about but rather the missing information, like channel labels, phase, delay, filters, EQ, inserts, compression ratios, gate thresholds, aux sends and masters settings that those faders would have been accessing.

President Obama had Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog to accurately parse the reality from many disparate pre-election polls. Sometime this year, live sound is going to have access to some clever data parsing of its own. CueCast, a digital mix console file-conversion service, is the first product of Zeehi, an entertainment technology company developing solutions to improve the workflow of entertainment production professionals, worldwide. And now that CueCast has come out of the extended beta period it’s been in since last summer, it’s ready to go live and large. The brainchild of Danny Abelson, an entertainment electronics consultant, Boulder, CO-based CueCast is an online service that lets individual live-sound mixers and SR companies small and large upload their consoles’ data, store it on CueCast’s servers and have it converted from its original format to that of another manufacturer’s, then download the converted data to the new destination desk.

A Cross-Platform Solution

The heart of the service is the conversion process, which takes place transparently in CueCast’s cloud. Currently, the service supports Avid’s VENUE D-Show, VENUE Profile, VENUE SC48 and VENUE SC48 Remote; DiGiCo’s SD8, SD8-24, SD10 and SD10-24; and Yamaha’s PM5D V2. Development is underway to support other brands and models. The range of parameter data is considerable, including input channel settings for features that reside post-preamp gain (due to I/O architecture) such as labeling, group assignments, dynamics, EQ, phase, bus configurations and so on. Future iterations of CueCast will convert variable level settings, snapshots and other features requested.

“CueCast solves a fundamental problem in audio engineering: transferring complex user settings from one console to another without the time-consuming headache of entering those settings manually,” says Abelson. “Converting show files on CueCast takes just three easy steps — simply upload your file to the secure CueCast site, specify the format you need, and download the converted file for installation in the new console.”

It’s a novel concept, and one that comes at an interesting time. The transition to digital audio mixing for live sound is in full swing, with a second and, some might argue, third generation of digital desks hitting the market now, and the number of live events has exploded, not only in music but also for corporate and other sectors. At the same time, the live event business is under the same pressures to develop and integrate more efficiencies and increase productivity. Being able to recall settings from the cloud in the event of some disaster befalling a console is one thing, but more common now is the need to use a single console for multiple events, such as at music festivals. If your data is formatted for Yamaha but you have to use a console made by Avid or DiGiCo at the venue, you’re looking at a lot of time spent inputting your data — assuming you have any time before the downbeat. Finally, the cloud, where CueCast’s storage and conversions take place, doesn’t elicit the trepidation that remote server storage once did. Consumers and companies are more comfortable leaving their information in that amorphous blob now.

In terms of cost, CueCast charges on a sliding scale based on the number of channels to be converted, starting at $48 for up to 24 channels and up to $588 for the limit of 196 channels; a typical 56-input configuration costs $168, per conversion, with monthly charges for ongoing storage of original and converted files kicking in after about 25. CueCast plans to offer the first two conversions for free, then will charge after that.

Abelson declined to discuss Cue-Cast’s start-up costs, though he did say that the most cost-intensive aspect of the project was in the development of the software CueCast uses to parse various manufacturers’ console settings data contained in user-generated show files and perform conversions between them. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest CueCast could generate some positive revenue. A large SR provider with 200 consoles at an average of 56 channels requiring as many as five conversions each comes to $168,000. Once start-up costs are amortized, what should be relatively affordable marketing, data storage and ongoing software development costs will likely result in a manageable overhead. As the digital console market continues to expand, the need for conversions and storage increase along with it, creating momentum for demand. CueCast can also be a value-added service for these same SR companies, who can surcharge their own clients for conversion and storage services.

It’s not all plug-and-play. The conversion process — which was extremely complex to begin with, requiring reconciliation of differences in the feature sets and methodologies the various manufacturers’ use in their product — is highly but not absolutely automated. Functions and settings that are common to two consoles are directly converted from one format to the other; when there are differences, or when a function found on one board is not supported by the other, CueCast notifies its client of the potential interoperability issue and, if possible, will suggest a workaround. And then there will be ongoing software revision costs as manufacturers update and revise their software and the way the data is stored within the user’s show files. Finally, Abelson concedes that live sound is an innately conservative business, and it will take time and persistence to convince the largest players to incorporate CueCast into routine operations.

Fortunately for Abelson, the technical bar is fairly high; he may not have to contend with a lot of competition, and despite the potential for it to become ubiquitous, the service is still the kind of niche that a single vendor can dominate. CueCast solves an information management issue for a business that’s becoming increasingly data driven. Nate Silver would be proud.

For more info, visit cuecast.com.