dw886 Posted August 1, 2019 Share Posted August 1, 2019 System has a set of Russound MCA-C5 audio controllers driving audio to multiple rooms. It seems that there's some kind of a bug where when an announcement is triggered for a particular room via the C4 Announcement Agent, regardless of whether or not the room is currently playing something, the zone becomes muted. If the zone is off, and an announcement executes, the room turns on, and then mutes. If the zone is currently on, the zone mutes and remains muted after the announcement completes. Has anyone else run into this, or does anyone have any creative ideas on how to programmatically get around this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Lowe Posted August 1, 2019 Share Posted August 1, 2019 what os version are you one? there were some announcement improvements made in later version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 1, 2019 Author Share Posted August 1, 2019 OS 3, and there's no use of the Announcements On/Off driver. If I play an announcement directly to a T3, it plays just fine. It only seems to send the "mute" command to the Russound if I choose a Russound zone for the announcement. At first I thought the announcement was bad, because sometimes it would play a split second and then cut out. After some trial and error, I could see that the zone was actually powering on, and then muting... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Lowe Posted August 1, 2019 Share Posted August 1, 2019 could be various things at play. Room connections. driver properties. I don't use russound so no ideas off the top of my head. Could be an issue with the driver as well, and may be something c4 technical support has to fix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Are you sure that it is muting (I.e. do you see a mute icon) on a navigator? If not, then try testing a very long start delay (20,000 milli seconds) in case the Russound is just taking a long time to prep for the announcement. Should this work, you can try decreasing the delay until you get as short a delay as possible that actually works. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 2, 2019 Author Share Posted August 2, 2019 10 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said: Are you sure that it is muting (I.e. do you see a mute icon) on a navigator? If not, then try testing a very long start delay (20,000 milli seconds) in case the Russound is just taking a long time to prep for the announcement. Should this work, you can try decreasing the delay until you get as short a delay as possible that actually works. Yes, it's definitely muting. I had a Russound keypad that I started watching to see if it wasn't powering on quick enough. The keypad would light up, the announcement would start playing about 1-2 words, and then the mute icon shows up on the russound keypad screen. If I press volume up on the keypad, then it'll un-mute playing whatever portion of the announcement that is left. Just for testing, I added an action to unmute the russound zone on the announcement event, but that didn't work. It seems to be a timing thing, because if I did "Start Volume Up", which would continuously increase volume, the zone would unmute, however the volume goes out of control as one would expect without a "Stop Volume Up" event. Rather than do some funky programming, I'd rather fix the issue if it's fixable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 I would try the longer delay for the announcement. It sounds like everything is not on when the delay ends. The same thing will occur if you have an AVR and don't have a sufficient start delay. The AVR can be stuck muted. Some AVRs require a 10000 ms delay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 2, 2019 Author Share Posted August 2, 2019 It seems like it's a discrete command that's being sent to the Russound unit at the start / end of an announcement. Not sure if it's doing this for the sake of trying to turn off whatever is playing in the room so the announcement is being heard, but it doesn't seem to understand that it's using that same devices for the announcement. I say this, because I was going to try to put an announcement at the start of a wake-up event. So I added logic that says "when wakeup event starts, then execute announcement". The announcement has a default audio delay of 500ms. When I execute the event in the room, here's what happens: 1.) Wakeup event triggers, the Russound keypad lights up, and the music from the wakeup event media starts for a brief second. 2.) Mute is shown on the keypad 3.) I press volume up on the keypad, which unmutes the room, and I join the announcement that's already in progress 4.) Announcement ends, and the keypad is once again muted 5.) I press volume up on the keypad, and mute turns off... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 That's likely your problem. I would separate the wakeup and the announcement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 2, 2019 Author Share Posted August 2, 2019 If they're separated, and I just play the announcement by itself, it turns on the Russound audio zone, and then mutes it, then turns it back off, so nothing is heard. Putting the two together just helps to understand what's happening since I can tell it's not the audio delay, because there's already music playing when the announcement decides to mute the zone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 What does the announcement do by itself if you have a 15000ms start delay? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lippavisual Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Does the Russound unit have discrete mute control?? or is it just a toggle? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 2, 2019 Author Share Posted August 2, 2019 1 hour ago, Dunamivora said: What does the announcement do by itself if you have a 15000ms start delay? Keypad turns on right away (unmuted), then 15 seconds later the keypad shows that the room is muted, the announcement plays to the muted room, and then the keypad turns back off. 1 hour ago, lippavisual said: Does the Russound unit have discrete mute control?? or is it just a toggle? It has discrete mute control. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 I wonder if there is an issue with the russound driver and the mute state. How long is your announcement file? Does a 5-10 second audio file play the audio at all? (rather than to a muted endpoint) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 2, 2019 Author Share Posted August 2, 2019 1 hour ago, Dunamivora said: I wonder if there is an issue with the russound driver and the mute state. How long is your announcement file? Does a 5-10 second audio file play the audio at all? (rather than to a muted endpoint) Doesn't matter how long the announcement is - that's the problem. When the announcement starts, the director turns on the zone, mutes the zone, then plays the audio file to a muted zone, and once the playback is complete, it turns the zone back off, resulting in no audio during playback of the file. If I play an announcement to a T3, it works fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 That for sure sounds like a driver issue. Who wrote it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Oh, is that the ExtraVeg driver last updated in 2014? If so, you may have a driver compatibility issue with OS3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-defunct- Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Did it work in 2.10.6? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dw886 Posted August 5, 2019 Author Share Posted August 5, 2019 On 8/2/2019 at 6:00 PM, Dunamivora said: That for sure sounds like a driver issue. Who wrote it? Yes, it's the Extra Vegetables driver that C4 bought. On 8/2/2019 at 6:03 PM, Dunamivora said: Did it work in 2.10.6? I wasn't using announcements on 2.10.x or 2.9, so I can't say if it worked then or not...but I would agree that it seems like it's a driver issue either on the Announcements side or the Extra Vegetables Russound driver... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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