Administrator Commands

The Q-SYS Administrator allows you to set up and maintain various Q-SYS resources.

You can load and manage audio files, customize user access, configure scheduled events, and much more.

We’ll walk through each of these versatile functions one by one,

but first you have to launch Q-SYS Administrator.

You can only do this while running the design on Core Hardware or in Emulation mode.

Then, you can access the Administrator through the Q-SYS Designer software

by selecting the Administrator icon in the upper-right hand corner

or by going to the File menu and selecting Tools > Show Q-SYS Administrator.

You can also use the stand-alone version of the Administrator program,

which you can download from the QSC website.

Using the stand-alone version rather than going through the Designer software allows the user to

perform administration tasks without having access to the running design.

Simply launch the program, select File>Administer, and select an available running design.

On the left side of the Administrator interface you will see a column of navigable tabs,

each of which controls a different aspect of the running design.

These include Commands, Command Schedule, Users, User Control Interfaces, Audio Files, and Event Log.

If you have a public address system in your design, then you will also see tabs for PA Global Settings,

Page Stations, and PA Zones. We’ll ignore these three tabs for now,

but if you’d like more information on them, check out the Paging Tutorial on qsctraining.com.

Let’s start with Commands. This tab allows you to create specific actions called commands,

which you can then automate using the Command Schedule tab.

Commands can also be activated from page stations. To create a command,

click the plus icon at the top of the center section: there are four types of commands,

though you will only be presented with options available to you.

There are PA Page Commands, PA Play Message Commands, Control Change Commands,

and Snapshot Load Commands. The PA commands will both be covered in the Paging Tutorial

with the other public address features, so let’s look at the other two.

A Control Change Command does exactly what it implies, it will change a control of your choice.

In order to make a control available for this feature, you’ll need to add it to your Named Controls bin.

Here let’s show you how: let’s disconnect from the Core and go back to design mode.

We’ll drag an Audio Player from our Schematic Library into our Schematic, open its control panel,

and we’ll drag a few of its controls into the Named Controls bin.

This doesn’t move the controls or remove them from the component,

it simply makes them accessible for control outside of the Schematic.

If you don’t have any controls in this bin, then you won’t have the option to add

add a Control Change Command in the Administrator. So let’s save our design to the Core

and run it again to gain access to the Administrator, and we’ll add a Control Change Command.

This settings menu will let us configure our new command.

You can name the command anything you like, let’s name this one “Gain to Full

we’ll use it to put the gain all the way up. You can also give it a numeric code of your choice

we’ll name this one 150 for some reason. This code is a sequence

that can be entered at a page station to remotely launch the command.

Next you’ll want to select which Control will be changed, we’ll select the Gain,

and then select the Value that it will be changed to – we’re going to set it to 20 decibels.

For a Gain knob like this one you can also select the Ramp Time,

which is how many seconds it will take to reach the value. Let’s have it take five seconds.

Now, certain controls are momentary, such as the Pause Button,

we’ll make a new command that’s the “Pause Button. And you can see here than rather than input a value

it simply indicates that the Pause control will be triggered when the Command is engaged.

Once you’ve configured your command, select the OK button

and you’ll see it added to your Commands list. In this list you can review your commands,

arrange them in ascending or descending order by each of these columns, you can adjust the column sizes,

or edit their settings once again by double-clicking them.

Alright, the next type of Command is the Snapshot Load Command.

A Snapshot Load Command will load a saved Snapshot that you have in one of your Snapshot Banks.

For more information on creating snapshots, check out the Snapshot Tutorial on qsctraining.com.

In this settings menu, simply select the name of your Snapshot Bank

we’ll use the Global one - which Snapshot number you would like to recall,

and then the ramp time to change its associated values.

Alright so let’s take a break right there.

In the next section we’ll learn about how to add tags to your Commands

as well as how to automate your Command events using the Command Scheduler.

So feel free to move on whenever you’re ready.