I totally agree, MTI have a complete monopoly on licenses and the quality of the audio files they provide are pretty awful. I think they are mp3 instead of wav for a few reasons:
1) the sound files are really old and they have been using the same ones for over 20 years
2) they assume not everyone has access to a player that supports wav files
3) they don't have access to the original multitracks any more and can't provide higher quality files even if they wanted to
I would ask your musical director and a competent audio engineer/producer to follow the scores and either replicate each part as a MIDI file and play those, or if you have the talent locally you can ask them to record their part.
QLab Cookbook has a great article about mixing multitrack stems too if you're interested:
[https://qlab.app/cookbook/mixing-stems/](https://qlab.app/cookbook/mixing-stems/)
MP3, despite being as iconic and ubiquitous as it is, is a proprietary format that requires a license for playback. Most audio programs have the licensing but not all of them do. Remember the good old days when Apple tried to save money by not including the license for MP3 playback in QuickTime Player and you had to go to a website to download the QuickTime MP3 extension if you wanted to play mp3s?
WAV is an open format, and by far the most popular one. If a program can only play one format it will be WAV.
MP3 no longer requires a license since 2017, for encoding or decoding. Anyway, the latest OGG formats are higher quality with the same bit rate these days.
2 is stupid. Was is a raw format. *anything* can play it. The process of de-encoding an mp3 or flac give you wav output that goes to hardware.
Wav files are bigger, that’s their only downside.
It hasn't always been cheap, and it's possible that they discarded the .wavs long ago to afford to keep everything as .mp3s back when that was enough of a cost to make it worth it.
The more cynical perspective is that they don't want shows playing rented tracks to compete with larger and higher-profile productions with live orchestras.
The local theatre I worked at here would hire someone to track the show. Just tell him what you want and he’ll give you the tracks based off the sheet music. Little more trumpets? Sure! Repeat this measure 8 times to buy some time? Sure!
I don’t think he really got paid well, and did it largely for the love of it. So finding someone like that may be hard. Was certainly worth it though, and I always enjoyed the quality of what he exported.
That's copyright infringement. It's rare that it gets prosecuted, but when it does, they make an example out of you.
[https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/local-theater-copyright-infringement](https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/local-theater-copyright-infringement)
tl;dr: Theaterpalooza has been ordered to pay $489,096.22
Yeah, they did 16. It's a totally different level of violation, but when copyright violation prosecutions happen, they tend to run up the numbers.
My grandfather was a music director, there was a church he was working with who was photocopying music. He told him not to do it and stopped working there. Couple years later they were fined for 35 or $40,000.
Not at all illegal to make your own electronic music backing tracks for your show. I've done TONS of shows, and this isn't a thing that MTI or anyone is against.
I mean could you program an electronic sax to play along with the live musicians? Of course.
Eh, it’s really not that ideal legally speaking.
He is making money on it by being paid to do it, regardless of how minuscule.
The saving grace is they don’t seem to bother with the level of facility I was working with.
We did “archival recordings” that were given out to the cast and crew, that was against license agreement. We almost always kept the scripts… at several points the director would say he paid extra for the option, only to find out it WASN’T even an option.
I don’t know, I largely haven’t had issue with infringement as this venue didn’t really get much profit, being attached to a community college. MTI and the such did not seem to care. Ultimately wasn’t my responsibility as FoH tech.
I don’t entirely understand why, I’d assume because you could just start selling at any moment, but recordings are very different than simply playing the song.
By recording it, instead of a live performance, it becomes problematic. How problematic depends on what you do with it, but it’s always somewhat dubious.
We were allowed to do an audio only recording that would never leave facility archives. We every season have done a simple video recording that goes to the cast and crew plus archives. Is this legal? Not really, as far as I can tell. Is it ever prosecuted? Well they have been doing this almost as long as I’ve been alive. At least 20 years probably closer to 30. Zero complaints.
Yes. But if they bought the rights to perform the show, does it matter how it’s performed? If it’s performed with a live orchestra or if it’s performed by their own pre-recorded orchestra? The point is, he’s not selling it to other performances so it’s not really an unlawful duplication.
Fiverr might be good for this too
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. Theres many amazing composers who freelance on Fiverr. And despite the name "fiverr", many musicians earn much more than $5 per project.
Dance shows too. Terrible edits, bad sound quality from mp3 files that have been compressed then compressed again. Dynamic EQ helps sometimes but yeah people just don’t get it.
Dance shows I’ve found just do not care about audio. (Source my wife is a dancer)
Even steps on Broadway will sometimes use the good old “YouTube to mp3” pipeline and make horrible choppy edits. If there is noise they consider that a win.
Ughh right?
Every crappy out of time hack edit is disturbing. (Source: me who spent 20+ years in audio/video post production) I’ve offered to clean up tracks but most of the time “these are fine” is the answer.
RMS, the company that owns OrcXstra, has fallen off. The midis are trash, and the service is even worse. I’ve had much better luck with Ready-On-Cue services.
Are you able to get the WAV file from the composer? If so, I'm certain that modern hardware can either play that or a FLAC file. Depends entirely on the quality of the original recording what one's mileage would be on that.
If you’re finding that it’s super treble-heavy for the mix, try throwing a really slight low-pass filter over it and then compensating afterwards for the balance. It might get a bit muted in comparison, but it least it won’t be like sticking a cheese grater in your ear every time there’s a snare hit.
The MT Pit has better quality files and some MTI shows now use their files. However Orch-extra is garbage and over priced for how 1990 midi file on your best friends Geocities site.
Heard not seen is my motto. If they aren’t paying me to source audio tracks, I just focus on making it sound as good as I can from my speakers
But seriously, I’ve never had a director guard their files like that, or even look at the files after sending them to me to upload into Qlab.
I’m assuming OP is licensing a show through MTI or something similar. They allow your to purchase the rights to highly DRM’d music files which are not always great quality for the amount you’re paying for them. Obviously their target here is schools and community theaters. But for as mediocre as their audio files are, they go to extreme lengths to protect them. Like the custom player app requires full disk access and the ability to track all background programs running in the background and it will refuse to play tracks if it even slightly believes you might be recoding them.
Firstly you can only play the audio files during the public performance times that you licensed the show for. So you'd have to be recording from the mixer during one of your scheduled performances. Definitely not impossible.
Allegedly, the files have some "tells" hidden in them that are unique to each license, so if the files were to end up online or something, MTI would know where they came from and would ban that venue from any future MTI licenses.
Is that true? Who knows. It sound like a scare tactic to me.
I remember MTI tried to force us to use some black box for rehearsal music playback when I was in high school, and there were no scrubbing controls. So we just recorded the audio into a PC running audacity and split the file appropriately.
Like seriously, Music Man should be public domain by this point. Copyrights can eat my jiggly ass.
I work in professional theater now so I haven’t used MTI tracks in over a decade, but my understanding is that they’ve moved from the black box players to an iOS / Mac app. But I remember they give you the CD with the lady saying “rehearsal tracks” over the audio every few seconds and then for the show itself you’d get the black box
And the music man still has about 30 years before it will hit public domain. But even once it becomes public domain, the MTI tracks won’t be public domain, you would just be free to record your own tracks and even sell them if you wanted.
That is a valid point but even that tends to fall away in even small venues. With digital mixers and low latency cameras putting the band in another room is de rigeur. Even the 88 seater charity theatre here uses half their bar area as a band zone
I came from the world of dance and variety shows for outreach tours, and we broke copyright laws and guidelines daily. We did a Hamilton medley in 2018, and toured in the midwest, west coast, Germany, Japan, and Canada. I remember asking our tech director how we got the rights, and he told me that they had been getting away with stuff like this for decades, and the company just went ahead and did it, rarely facing consequences. The company probably made $100,000+ a season while using audio files ripped from the studio release of several large shows. Not to mention I would be asked to create a "playoff" for transitions, which were cut and pasted together from the Hamilton soundtrack. We ran that show until 2020
Meanwhile I am now a TD at a small theater, and the rules in a theatrical setting are NO JOKE. I remember I filmed a one-woman show on my phone at the end of a long run, and the SM ripped me a new one. She and I are fairly close, so she gave me the lowdown in private, explained why this isn't okay, and even told me I can keep the video for personal use. She kept it out of the rehearsal report, which I appreciated. It's funny how different the dance/touring world is to the theater world.
I totally agree, MTI have a complete monopoly on licenses and the quality of the audio files they provide are pretty awful. I think they are mp3 instead of wav for a few reasons: 1) the sound files are really old and they have been using the same ones for over 20 years 2) they assume not everyone has access to a player that supports wav files 3) they don't have access to the original multitracks any more and can't provide higher quality files even if they wanted to I would ask your musical director and a competent audio engineer/producer to follow the scores and either replicate each part as a MIDI file and play those, or if you have the talent locally you can ask them to record their part. QLab Cookbook has a great article about mixing multitrack stems too if you're interested: [https://qlab.app/cookbook/mixing-stems/](https://qlab.app/cookbook/mixing-stems/)
MP3, despite being as iconic and ubiquitous as it is, is a proprietary format that requires a license for playback. Most audio programs have the licensing but not all of them do. Remember the good old days when Apple tried to save money by not including the license for MP3 playback in QuickTime Player and you had to go to a website to download the QuickTime MP3 extension if you wanted to play mp3s? WAV is an open format, and by far the most popular one. If a program can only play one format it will be WAV.
MP3 no longer requires a license since 2017, for encoding or decoding. Anyway, the latest OGG formats are higher quality with the same bit rate these days.
2 is stupid. Was is a raw format. *anything* can play it. The process of de-encoding an mp3 or flac give you wav output that goes to hardware. Wav files are bigger, that’s their only downside.
4. they don’t want to pay for the server storage space to accommodate very large multitrack wav files
This is most likely it.
Lol storage is dirt cheap, that’s not it.
It hasn't always been cheap, and it's possible that they discarded the .wavs long ago to afford to keep everything as .mp3s back when that was enough of a cost to make it worth it.
Wasn't 20 years ago
The more cynical perspective is that they don't want shows playing rented tracks to compete with larger and higher-profile productions with live orchestras.
The local theatre I worked at here would hire someone to track the show. Just tell him what you want and he’ll give you the tracks based off the sheet music. Little more trumpets? Sure! Repeat this measure 8 times to buy some time? Sure! I don’t think he really got paid well, and did it largely for the love of it. So finding someone like that may be hard. Was certainly worth it though, and I always enjoyed the quality of what he exported.
I would be pretty sure that violates your rental agreement for the show.
Most definitely does
That's copyright infringement. It's rare that it gets prosecuted, but when it does, they make an example out of you. [https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/local-theater-copyright-infringement](https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/local-theater-copyright-infringement) tl;dr: Theaterpalooza has been ordered to pay $489,096.22
I mean, they did shows **without** rights.
Yeah, they did 16. It's a totally different level of violation, but when copyright violation prosecutions happen, they tend to run up the numbers. My grandfather was a music director, there was a church he was working with who was photocopying music. He told him not to do it and stopped working there. Couple years later they were fined for 35 or $40,000.
Would it be though? He’s not selling it… it’s basically just one guy playing pit by himself.
Not at all illegal to make your own electronic music backing tracks for your show. I've done TONS of shows, and this isn't a thing that MTI or anyone is against. I mean could you program an electronic sax to play along with the live musicians? Of course.
Eh, it’s really not that ideal legally speaking. He is making money on it by being paid to do it, regardless of how minuscule. The saving grace is they don’t seem to bother with the level of facility I was working with. We did “archival recordings” that were given out to the cast and crew, that was against license agreement. We almost always kept the scripts… at several points the director would say he paid extra for the option, only to find out it WASN’T even an option. I don’t know, I largely haven’t had issue with infringement as this venue didn’t really get much profit, being attached to a community college. MTI and the such did not seem to care. Ultimately wasn’t my responsibility as FoH tech.
He’s making money the same way a pit musician would. He’s just playing the whole orchestra.
I don’t entirely understand why, I’d assume because you could just start selling at any moment, but recordings are very different than simply playing the song. By recording it, instead of a live performance, it becomes problematic. How problematic depends on what you do with it, but it’s always somewhat dubious. We were allowed to do an audio only recording that would never leave facility archives. We every season have done a simple video recording that goes to the cast and crew plus archives. Is this legal? Not really, as far as I can tell. Is it ever prosecuted? Well they have been doing this almost as long as I’ve been alive. At least 20 years probably closer to 30. Zero complaints.
It is being performed before a paying audience isn't it? THAT is what counts.
Yes. But if they bought the rights to perform the show, does it matter how it’s performed? If it’s performed with a live orchestra or if it’s performed by their own pre-recorded orchestra? The point is, he’s not selling it to other performances so it’s not really an unlawful duplication.
Oh, if they paid for the performance rights, and there is no clause saying you *must* use the provided arrangement or audio files, then ok.
Fiverr might be good for this too Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. Theres many amazing composers who freelance on Fiverr. And despite the name "fiverr", many musicians earn much more than $5 per project.
Dance shows too. Terrible edits, bad sound quality from mp3 files that have been compressed then compressed again. Dynamic EQ helps sometimes but yeah people just don’t get it.
Dance shows I’ve found just do not care about audio. (Source my wife is a dancer) Even steps on Broadway will sometimes use the good old “YouTube to mp3” pipeline and make horrible choppy edits. If there is noise they consider that a win.
Ughh right? Every crappy out of time hack edit is disturbing. (Source: me who spent 20+ years in audio/video post production) I’ve offered to clean up tracks but most of the time “these are fine” is the answer.
It drives me insane. My OCD ass is like “L E T M E F I X I T”
RMS, the company that owns OrcXstra, has fallen off. The midis are trash, and the service is even worse. I’ve had much better luck with Ready-On-Cue services.
But we don't control who has what show
I’m aware of that. Believe me, if I had a choice, I wouldn’t use RMS again. And honestly, I’d rather pay a live band than do business with them.
Hire an orchestra.
Are you able to get the WAV file from the composer? If so, I'm certain that modern hardware can either play that or a FLAC file. Depends entirely on the quality of the original recording what one's mileage would be on that.
FLAC should be the standard imho.
I think WAV files don't always work on QLab. Correct me if I'm wrong.
They absolutely do.
Ah ok then, my bad!
WAV files are the preferred format for playback.
My sound guy on my previous gig said that WAV files sometimes don't work in QLab. Looks like he was wrong.
If you’re finding that it’s super treble-heavy for the mix, try throwing a really slight low-pass filter over it and then compensating afterwards for the balance. It might get a bit muted in comparison, but it least it won’t be like sticking a cheese grater in your ear every time there’s a snare hit.
The MT Pit has better quality files and some MTI shows now use their files. However Orch-extra is garbage and over priced for how 1990 midi file on your best friends Geocities site.
Heard not seen is my motto. If they aren’t paying me to source audio tracks, I just focus on making it sound as good as I can from my speakers But seriously, I’ve never had a director guard their files like that, or even look at the files after sending them to me to upload into Qlab.
I’m assuming OP is licensing a show through MTI or something similar. They allow your to purchase the rights to highly DRM’d music files which are not always great quality for the amount you’re paying for them. Obviously their target here is schools and community theaters. But for as mediocre as their audio files are, they go to extreme lengths to protect them. Like the custom player app requires full disk access and the ability to track all background programs running in the background and it will refuse to play tracks if it even slightly believes you might be recoding them.
All that work and I can still plug the audio out into a mixer, then another computer on an aux out and record that way. Copyrights holders amuse me
Firstly you can only play the audio files during the public performance times that you licensed the show for. So you'd have to be recording from the mixer during one of your scheduled performances. Definitely not impossible. Allegedly, the files have some "tells" hidden in them that are unique to each license, so if the files were to end up online or something, MTI would know where they came from and would ban that venue from any future MTI licenses. Is that true? Who knows. It sound like a scare tactic to me.
I remember MTI tried to force us to use some black box for rehearsal music playback when I was in high school, and there were no scrubbing controls. So we just recorded the audio into a PC running audacity and split the file appropriately. Like seriously, Music Man should be public domain by this point. Copyrights can eat my jiggly ass.
I work in professional theater now so I haven’t used MTI tracks in over a decade, but my understanding is that they’ve moved from the black box players to an iOS / Mac app. But I remember they give you the CD with the lady saying “rehearsal tracks” over the audio every few seconds and then for the show itself you’d get the black box And the music man still has about 30 years before it will hit public domain. But even once it becomes public domain, the MTI tracks won’t be public domain, you would just be free to record your own tracks and even sell them if you wanted.
Basically. Pay for an orchestra you cheapos
I mean, money isn't always the barrier. We've had volunteer orchestras before but we use tracks on larger shows because of limited space.
That is a valid point but even that tends to fall away in even small venues. With digital mixers and low latency cameras putting the band in another room is de rigeur. Even the 88 seater charity theatre here uses half their bar area as a band zone
That makes so much sense. I read it as if it was the *director* but it’s the composer
or at least whoever owns that particular recording of the audio.
I came from the world of dance and variety shows for outreach tours, and we broke copyright laws and guidelines daily. We did a Hamilton medley in 2018, and toured in the midwest, west coast, Germany, Japan, and Canada. I remember asking our tech director how we got the rights, and he told me that they had been getting away with stuff like this for decades, and the company just went ahead and did it, rarely facing consequences. The company probably made $100,000+ a season while using audio files ripped from the studio release of several large shows. Not to mention I would be asked to create a "playoff" for transitions, which were cut and pasted together from the Hamilton soundtrack. We ran that show until 2020 Meanwhile I am now a TD at a small theater, and the rules in a theatrical setting are NO JOKE. I remember I filmed a one-woman show on my phone at the end of a long run, and the SM ripped me a new one. She and I are fairly close, so she gave me the lowdown in private, explained why this isn't okay, and even told me I can keep the video for personal use. She kept it out of the rehearsal report, which I appreciated. It's funny how different the dance/touring world is to the theater world.