🎬 Inspiration

In the high-stakes world of live audio, time is your most volatile asset.

Every sound engineer knows the nightmare: you’ve spent hours meticulously crafting a show mix on your Behringer X32 (or whichever type of digital console you own). You arrive at the venue—crowd buzzing, adrenaline rising—only to find a last-minute substitution: the house console is an Allen & Heath GLD.

Your scene file is now useless. Ten minutes to showtime. No time for mistakes. You’re forced to rebuild everything from scratch, under pressure.

This is the painful result of proprietary, incompatible file formats—a silent but serious flaw in the digital audio world. Scene Translator exists to solve it.

🧠 What it does

Scene Translator is a smart web tool that acts like a universal phrasebook for audio engineers.

• 🎚 Upload your .scn scene file from a Behringer X32
• 🔍 Translate it via a custom parser + AI engine into a clear instruction set
• 🎛 Rebuild the mix on an Allen & Heath GLD using human-readable guidance

It turns a high-stress scramble into a smooth, confident transition—saving hours and reducing the risk of error when it matters most.

🏗️ How we built it

• Frontend: Built with Vue 3 + Vite for responsiveness and simplicity
• Parser: A handcrafted JavaScript parser reverse-engineered from scratch to extract structured mix data from .scn files
• AI Engine: GPT-3.5 Turbo generates professional, readable setup sheets
• Backend: A secure Node.js + Express proxy relays data to OpenAI, protecting the API key from exposure
• Build: Unified NPM script builds the frontend and serves it via the Express backend

⚔️ Challenges we ran into

• ❌ Sponsored APIs weren’t fit for natural language generation
• 🚫 Supabase Edge Functions failed due to CORS and 401 auth issues
• 🔐 Had to build a secure proxy backend under pressure
• 🧪 Hit OpenAI usage tier limits—pivoted to a full Demo Mode for reliability

🏆 Accomplishments we're proud of

• ✅ Cracked a proprietary file format with no documentation
• 🔐 Built a full-stack, secure app architecture in 48 hours
• 🎥 Delivered a flawless demo by designing around real-world API limitations
• 🎛 Created a scalable foundation for brand-to-brand translation across consoles

📚 What we learned

• Always validate third-party tools before committing
• Custom proxies can solve a world of auth and CORS issues
• Prompt design is crucial for turning technical data into clear human instructions

• Build for clarity, resilience, and fallback—even in a hackathon

  🚀 What's next for Scene Translator

• 🔄 Support for Midas, Yamaha, DiGiCo, and other major consoles

• ↔️ Bidirectional translation between any two supported brands

• ☁️ Cloud file storage, team collaboration, and saved presets

• 📱 Mobile-first rebuild assistant for touring engineers

• 💼 Subscription-based SaaS offering for audio professionals

• 🎧 Potential release through Cowley Road Studios as part of a new pro-audio tools suite

The live demo URL is currently running in "Demo Mode" to ensure a stable and flawless experience for judging. This version uses a hardcoded example response from the server.

The code on this main branch, specifically in server.js, contains the full, production-ready integration with the live OpenAI API (gpt-3.5-turbo). The application is complete, pending the standard 24-48 hour provisioning time for our new OpenAI account to be upgraded from their "Tier 1" usage limits.

Built With

• gbt
• gemini
• manus
• you.com