I have a small light "show" consisting of 8 ADJ MegaPar Profiles, to be expanded upon at a later time. Should I go with a controller or a MyDMX type S/W? Is there other S/W out there I should consider other than the MyDMX, if the controller is not the way to go?
I think you might like Chauvette ShowXpress (also available as
SweetLight). I've been 'using' it (testing really) for some time and quite like it. It was the only software that I tried that I was able to understand how to use to a reasonable extent within an hour and had two things going for it: integrated 3d visualizer and quite reasonable MIDI control. I find it very simple to use.
There is one thing that I don't like about it, but that is very specific for to use: MIDI responsiveness and DMX frame rate is not quite where I would like it to be. Mind you, it's not bad but I bought this for the specific purpose of integrating this with my own MIDI->DMX software which, among other things, starts sequences based on specific chords being played, sound changes on my synths and other things like snare hits.
It all actually works perfectly but the responsiveness to the snare hits especially could be a bit faster, especially if you hit the snare in succession. To get around this I have actually ordered an ENTTEC USB DMX PRO which has an API available for it and am now writing my own software do handle the triggerind and actual DMX playback of sequences through the Enttec interface that I have created in ShowXpress (essentially replacing their 'Live' application with my own) to see if I can get it to be more responsive and squeeze more DMX frames out of my Netbook. Fortunately the ShowXpress sequence format was easy to reverse engineer because I sure as hell wouldn't want to write a full-fledged DMX software including visualization, programming etc.
If you are not as a**l as I am about DMX frame rates and the likes I'm pretty sure you will like ShowXpress as much as I do. I use it with their ShowXpress 512 hardware interface which has its own microcontroller built in (rather than the simpler version which has no buffering/micro controller and relies upon the PC to take care of DMX signal timing and has several limitations in terms of number of DMX channels and concurrent 3d visualization).