> > Hi John, > > Your real problem seems a whole lot different from what your original > post described! The MP3 playback seems to be used more like > a tape deck > -- it just starts and goes and goes -- the playback is all or > nothing, > not bits and pieces.
That's true for the final product. In fact if I didn't want the lights synchronized to the beats of the music I could just start the music with one of the Delphi WAV apps and then start by backend light show. But if you check out the Light-O-Rama demo videos on setting up a light show to music you will quickly see that the ability to start and stop and play bits of the music file are critical to setting up the synchronization. > If you were to incorporate any of the Light-o-rama > technology, it would > only be the front end of their software. You will have to write your > own back end to drive the LED bus. But I suspect you've already done > that, based on the demo videos you have. That's what I originally requested from Light-O-Rame. No joy there. > > You might want to consider a more general tool for the display design > process. The MIDI bus is widely used for lighting control > (or at least > it was 15 years ago, when I was actively doing theater). DMX-512 is the common protocol for this sort of thing. It's an RS485 based protocol described by an ANSI E1.11-2008 document which I had to buy for $52.99 Cdn. In DMX-512 there are 513 slots in a Universe and each slot is an 8 bit value. Light-O-Rama has a converter for about $300 which takes their protocol and creates DMX-512. They assign a number of slots to one channel. It's very timing sensitive and RS485 so a PC might not be capable of doing this which is why they have the external board. Physically(electrically) the DMX-512 can only address 32 devices per bus which is one reason I went CAN bus. Also each of my lamps has 4 LED colours, group intensity and a special features byte so I'd need 6 bytes for each lamp which would only allow me 85 lights per Universe (512/6). Since each ring has 750 light positions, I'd need 9 Universes and have to try and organize them into the 5 rings. <snip> > It may even be that there are stage control programs that use the CAN > bus protocol. Happy Googling! I have been looking for DMX products but so far nothing is quite right. Our current software shows the 5 rings and if I zoom in I can even get at the individual lights of each ring. I can set the RGBWI values and special features of each light or a group of lights. Each of those can be saved as an event and we can run those events sequentially including loops for N times. It's already pretty powerful display software that is driven from a windows timer. What I need is to be able to run the events, not from a TimerDone Event but from a mark in a music file. To put the mark into a music file I need to create a play file that has the music and the marks in one. As I send the music buffer out to the player, I will periodically come across the marks which tell me to do the next sequence or event. That's the plan. It's setting it up and testing it before going live that's the hard part. > > I hope this different perspective is of some help to you. > > Rainer > Thanks John _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> Delphi@elists.org http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi
