I'm not a lighting professional, so I can't draw from a well of experience on this topic. I have, however, looked into synchronizing lights to music, at some length, and from what I've gleaned, it ain't easy. The best I could come up with was a
MP3 player from a company called compuphase, that can parse out the ID3 tags from the
MP3's, and spit them out to "another devices" for the purpose of triggering lighting sequences. Here's a link to their device which includes a description of how to use the ID3 tags:
Synchronizing activities with music
The "other device" you need is a Color Kinetcs iplayer3
http://www.colorkinetics.com/support/userGuides/iPlayer_3_UG.pdf
See appendixB (p33) where it talks about remote triggering.
So the process involves using Color Kinetics software (that comes with the iplayer3) to design your lighting show using the iplayer3 &
DMX controllable fixtures, and splitting the lighting sequences into segments that can be "remotely triggered" via the iplayer3's serial port. Then you edit the
MP3 files, inserting ID3 text which are simply the characters the iplayer wants as trigger commands. Then you
play the edited
MP3 files on the compuphase player, and configure it so that the ID3 tags (which are simply
ascii characters) get sent out it's serial port, to the iplayer3. I never actually built & tested this setup, although I'm pretty sure it could be made to work. We did however, get a similar method to work using a desktop computer, WinAmp, and a plugin called "minilyrics".
So, there's this program called "minilyrics" which acts as a plugin to WinAmp and can parse the ID3 tags from a
MP3 and show them on the
screen as the song plays in WinAmp. Supposedly the minilyrics plugin can be easily modified so that the lyrics (ID3 tags) can be sent out a serial port instead of showing up on the
screen. I actually saw this work, and saw triggered lighting sequences stay synchronized to the music as WinAmp played the
MP3's and the modified minilyrics plugin sent the ID3 tags to the serial port for triggering the iplayer3. I can't attest to the
ease of modifying minilyrics to use the serial port however. Someone else we knew did this for us, and I don't think it was all that easy.
Sorry if this wasn't what you were looking for... but I thought the information might be interesting to others as well... I'd be interested if anyone else has figured out an easier way to do this also.