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Sound Reinforcement - Forums for Live Sound Professionals - Your Displayed Name Must Be Your Real Full Name To Post In The Live Sound Forums => SR Forum Archives => Lighting FUD Forum Archive => Topic started by: Matt Dittman on January 14, 2011, 01:20:20 PM

Title: Exploring new lighting software options (currently using Freestyler)
Post by: Matt Dittman on January 14, 2011, 01:20:20 PM
I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on whether there is any lighting software that will do exactly what I need to do. Freestyler has hit me with some design limitations.

My situation:

We are a band that runs lights entirely from the stage. I have a MIDI foot controller (ART X-15) that sends MIDI commands to my laptop. I then use Bome's Midi Translator to interpret those commands to keypress events. Freestyler captures the keypress events and each keypress tells the software to hit a particular button in the software which changes the lights to that scene. Our laptop is behind us and not visible, and we want to run it using the foot controller without having to make the laptop screen visible.

Unfortunately, when they added more cues, they introduced "paging", with only 16-20 scenes/cues/whatever per page (depending on what you use). I already have more than 20 scenes available to me so this won't work*. This means that I would need to scroll through the pages, then select whatever number the cue/sequence/etc. is. I want one button push scene changes from the controller.

Is anyone aware of any reasonably priced lighting software that will allow me to directly access all multi-step cues/sequences using a single keypress event (midi may work, depending if it will accept the MIDI generated by my foot controller)? What I have, I can probably make it work good enough... but I'm planning on changing it around and adding lights so it may be a good time to make a change.


*I have 23 buttons activated on the foot controller. Three are cues, and the other 20 are assigned to Override buttons. The problem with that approach is that override buttons only play the first step in a sequence. I would love to be able to make multi-step sequences that are available to me from the foot controller.
Title: Re: Exploring new lighting software options (currently using Freestyler)
Post by: Randy Pence on January 14, 2011, 05:50:32 PM
pc_dimmer? it is also free