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.
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.
There are a few options:
Unfortunately, the HomePod only supports one stream at a time.
There are two different volume controls on the iPad; the switch on the side of it (hardware) and the volume slider on each effect (software). The hardware switch sets the absolute maximum volume that comes out of the iPad, so the best thing is to turn it up all the way and then use the software sliders on the effects to get the volume just right.
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.
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Apple's official iTunes support can be found here: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/