I work at a small theatre and am anxious to increase the automation of our audio work. We use Pro Tools Free, Digital Performer, Peak, Reason, etc. to produce the audio for our productions, but playback during performance is still primarily from CD, minidisk, and simple playlist apps like SoundJam. I have resisted buying a multi-channel audio card primarily because I have been unable to find software that both supports more than 2 channels of output and still allows the rapid firing of cues we require.

Ideally, there would be a list of cues or events, each of which consists of one or more audio files and envelope and panning information. Firing a cue would result in the associated audio being played on one or more outputs. (Image planes passing overhead, overlapping children's voices from all corners of the theatre, etc., etc.)

I am aware of specialized hardware solutions such as AudioBox and Matrix3, but these seem overkill for our small space and far too expensive. I am certain our needs can be met by software and a decent sound card. Indeed Pro Tools does everything we need except allow the flexible (performance contingent) firing of the entire show.

Any ideas? TIA.

(BTW: 400MHz G3 B&W, scads of memory and HD)