Automated Fixtures sound to light question

[bobmackadoo]

Hi all, I'm fairly new to the lighting game, but could really use some help, we are starting a mobile DJ company, we have 2 identical laptops, one with Daslight, the other with virtual DJ pro, the Daslight is fine, the virtual DJ seems to be lacking midi outputs however, I had the intention of creating a new scene for each song, then triggering each new scene for each song using the midi output on virtual DJ pro, so my DJ would just press play on the first laptop, and the preprogrammed light show on the second laptop would happen, the problem is, I don't think virtual DJ has midi out capabilities, so that leaves me searching for new DJ software, does anyone have any ideas or suggestions at all, possibly about different DJ software? Has anyone messed about with using midi triggers, am I going about this the right way, is what I'm tryin to accomplish even possible?
I would greatly appreciate any advice that I can get, thanks in advance,

Wes Leturgez

 

[bobmackadoo]

anyone? any ideas at all? Bump.

 

[dj41354]

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.

 

[techno89]

What I've seen is basically the DJ's wil have that 2 laptop setup and you will premake different effects scenes in daslight and just click them when you want to use them. Since at things like bar and bat mitzvahs when you're playing pop music just different mover effects and color changing and crap like that will look amazing.

 

[bobmackadoo]

Wow, this seems to be a really complicated problem, I had no idea anything like this would be so difficult to do. I am definitely gonna keep working on this cause it's what my boss wants, thanks for all the info, looks like I got a bunch more stuff to research, thanks for the leads and ideas, I'll post back if i think of anything else, if anyone has any other ideas I welcome them.

 

[cpf]

Both VDJ and daslight support Midi IO, your challenge is just to configure them correctly. You'll need 2 Midi interfaces and a good weekend of time, but beyond that I have no idea.