Horizon to speak MIDI...

[Dionysus]

My friend owns a Gold edition copy of Horizon with a 512-channel interface. One of the things I'd like to do with it is get it to send MIDI show control to another computer to trigger sound cues.

I know how to use MIDI the real difficulty is this. Horizon is designed to do this, however it is only designed to do this (or so they tell me) with one of two external modules that have optional MIDI interfaces. These are the Horizon Playback controller and the Horizon Ethernet Node.
We don't have either of these, and they are also discontinued (as is all of Horizon as I'm sure you know).

Anyways my friend who owns it wanted me to see if there was indeed a way we could still get it to work. I don't have the programming skills needed to patch Horizon (and yes it's the GOLD licence so that is possible under the licence).

We are currently using cheap USB MIDI interfaces. And it does work, just Horizon doesn't talk to the MIDI interface.

Any ideas that don't require large sums of money?

[DaveySimps]

You can just use a PathPort Node as your ethernet node, and you would have a working Horizon set up. Although, I think you still need to the show controller to do the MIDI stuff. What exactly are you trying to trigger? Horizon allows you to do quite a bit with audio under the Function Bar. If you are just looking to trigger simple playback effects on cue, you can burn the effects to a CD (or wave file), load it in the same computer as Horizon is running on, and then program them using the function bar.

You may want to contact tech support at Horizon. Brian may be able to point you in the direction of someone who still has a playback controller in stock. It never hurts to ask.

Another way may be to use Rosco's Keystroke software and interface to trigger the cues on another computer. It is not the cheapest solution, but may work depending on what your needs are.

~Dave

[icewolf08]

Here is a second for Keystroke. It is a little more versatile than a MIDI interface as you can program it to input any keystroke or key string. Investing in Keystroke will let you run audio when you need to or projections, or any other computer based software right from your lighting console.