Belfry is a media and sound effects player for use in small-scale theatre venues, like those found in many schools.

It was designed with students and young adults in mind to be simple, intuitive, and versatile.

With Belfry, an entire production's soundscape can be assembled and run from the iPad.

• Sound Overlay - Play up to 60 sounds concurrently
• iTunes Support - Choose any song or effect from your iTunes library
• File Saving - Save your production's setup once you've perfected it
• Intermission Playlist - Manage the pre and post performance music from one place
• Independent Volume Control - Set each effect's volume individually
• Looping - Set an effect to play once or continuously

• Get All My Sound Effects in one spot?

The easiest way is to use your computer to create an Album in iTunes that has all of your production's sounds in it. Transfer this album to your iPad. Within Belfry, tap the "plus" button to add an effect. The iTunes Media Picker will be displayed, and at the bottom of that is a button labeled Album. Tap that, and your album of show specific sounds will be displayed, allowing you to quickly locate your effects.

• Get The Sound Out to external speakers?

There are a few options:

Headphone Jack - a stereo mini-jack can plug into the headphone jack of the iPad and then into the Line-In of a receiver, stereo system, etc.


iPod Dock - a stereo system with an iPod dock can be used.


Bluetooth Enabled Speakers - the iPad can stream audio out wirelessly to speakers that support the A2DP standard.


Airplay Enabled Speakers - the iPad can stream audio out wirelessly to speakers that support the Apple Airplay standard.

• Intermission Tab limited to 20 songs?

The biggest limitation of iPad development is that of the hardware. To keep the iPad's responsiveness at a high level, I've placed this artificial limit on the Intermission Tab's playlist to make certain that it functions on all available releases of the iPad: 1, 2, and 3.

• My DRM protected file not playing?

The short answer: Re-encode your DRM protected audio into a non-DRM protected track before transfering it to your iPad. To do this: Burn the music to a CD from iTunes, then rip the CD back into iTunes. The DRM will be removed.

The long answer: Fairplay or other DRM protected files can't be played directly. Part of the protection measures for DRM files is a 'locking' of the audio playback hardware, which supposedly keeps audio processes from beating the DRM protection scheme and playing back the audio. In the United States DRM was dropped from music in the iTunes store years ago, but this isn't the case worldwide. Oddly enough, the latest and greatest media playback API from Apple can't play the company's own DRM scheme. The workaround is to burn a CD of the DRM protected music and then rip the music from that CD back into iTunes. The EULA of the music allows for this burning and ripping 5 or 7 times depending on where and when it was purchased from iTunes. Perfectly legitimate. In fact, this un-DRMing of the iTunes purchased tracks was the crux of Apple's argument in an anti-trust case a few years ago in France. It's not an ideal solution, but it's the only one the lawyers and programmers have left us with at the moment. As soon as the API is updated on Apple's end to allow for DRM playback in their source code I will update Belfry accordingly.

Need some personalized help? Have a comment or suggestion? Please contact me at

help@belfrysound.com

Apple's official iTunes support can be found here: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/