Users, UCIs, & Audio Files

Welcome back. Let’s take a look at the next few sections of the Administrator interface.

Our next tab is the Users tab, which provides a means

of securing various areas of a Q-Sys system as well as establishing priorities in the Public Address System.

A Guest User is always present, which cannot be renamed or deleted,

and by default has access to all features. If you create a New User using the plus icon here,

you can select a name for the User – I’ll name my user Nate

and select a security PIN for that User to log in with. I’ll give you all access to my secret code, it’s 12345.

In the Access Permissions panel, you’ll note that all the available options are grayed out

and say “Enabled in Guest Account." This is because every User will have access to the features

that the Guest account has access to. If you would like to begin restricting areas for certain users,

then you need to start by denying those privileges to your Guest account.

For example you double-click the Guest User, and change an Access Permission to No.

Now if you’re going to edit another User then you have the option to grant or deny access to this feature.

You may notice that the File Management Protocol is enabled by providing access to Administrator,

but it can also be accessed by some external controls.

So if you deny a User access to Administrator, then you can then separately choose whether

or not they can have access to the File Management.

I’m going to give myself access again. You can also choose to assign Users different tags

I’m going to give myself the Boom tag.

Boom – that’s me. You can filter your view by viewing these tags

and you can also edit multiple Users at once by selecting multiple profiles and double-clicking to edit them

Adding tags will also make it much easier to give groups of Users

access to UCIs and Page Stations, as we’ll see in just a moment.

Let’s move on to the User Control Interfaces tab, or UCI.

Here you’ll see a list of all the UCI pages you’ve created in your design,

including the default Inventory Status UCI. Now in the Administrator,

you can select which Users have access to each UCI.

Simply double-click a UCI and then you have the option to change the Require User Logon field to Yes.

Now you can personally select which users should be given authorization

by checking the box next to a User’s name, or select all Users with similar tags by checking that Tag.

If you do this, you cannot uncheck a User with that tag as long as that Tag is checked.

Select OK when you’re finished. Now when another user attempts to access the UCI,

they will be presented with a password protection screen.

The next tab in the Administrator is for managing your Audio Files.

Since this involves storing audio on your Core and playing it back,

you’ll need a Core to follow along with this part of the tutorial.

The files stored on the Core are stored in several different directories.

The Messages folder is for storing audio files that can be played by the PA Play Messages Command.

The Preambles folder is for audio that is played using the PA Page Command.

This Page Archives folder is for storing old pages, and the Audio folder is for all other audio

which you can organize however you like.

You can use the Audio Player component in your design to playback files in any of these directories.

To upload an audio file to the Core, double-click a directory

and click on the plus icon at the top of the window.

Select the file or files that you would like to upload from your computer

I’ll play all these from my Music folder

and they will be copied to the Core’s internal media drive

You can see them loading here at the bottom of your screen.

Once they’re ready, you’ll see the files displayed here in the window,

and you can listen to the track over your PC’s sound card by selecting the play button to the right of the filename.

Yeah. To delete a file simply press the Delete key, or you can right click and select Delete.

Keep in mind that these files are saved directly to the Core and are not contained within your Designer file,

so if you were to design a system on one Core and then deploy it on another,

you would have to reload all the same audio files you used into the same directories on the new Core.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re using a redundant Core,

any file you upload via the Administrator is automatically kept in-sync between the two cores.

For more information on the sizes of available media drives

and how to upgrade your Core’s capacity for playing back simultaneous tracks,

check out our Multi-Track Player Demonstration on qsctraining.com.

But first, go ahead and move on to the final section of this Administrator tutorial whenever you’re ready.