Sometimes it would be nice if you could correspond with a QLab workspace from anywhere in the world, tell it what to do, and for it to reply and tell you what it was up to.
Here it is in action (Best viewed full screen):
An email is sent with the subject line #OSC
This is received by Mail running on the same computer as the remote QLab workspace.
Immediately it is picked up by a rule which tells Mail to run a script if any email with that subject is received.
The script is executed. It translates the body text of the email to an OSC instruction which it sends to QLab
It starts a script cue in QLab numbered REPLY, which sends an email to you with a list of all currently running cues.
How to correspond with your QLab:
First we have to write a script which we can use with a rule in the Apple Mail application.
We save this script as QlabOSC.scpt in Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.mail
In the Rules tab of Mail preferences, we add a rule to run the script any time an email is received with the subject line: #OSC
In the QLab workspace, we create a new cue list and put a script cue in it numbered REPLY
Put your name and email address in this script!
We then make sure we have QLab and Mail open and QLab is set to the main cue list at the top of the show.
Here is an example email:
Other examples of OSC messages we might use are:
/panic to stop the workspace
/reset
/playhead/1003
/pause
/resume
/cue/1001/start etc.
Here is a typical reply from the workspace:
You can download an example workspace without audio, and the OSC script here
If you just want to send an email or SMS from QLab, perhaps confirming a wall clock has fired, or similar then you can use.
Chapter Author: Mic Pool
Chapter Graphic: Photo by Piotr Zurek
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
Modified Image distributed under the same terms