Best protocol for sending beat signals into Lightjams?

[Michael Goldberg]

I'm creating a setup that will use DJay Pro on the music side of things, and Lightjams on the lighting side of things. DJay Pro allows using spotify, which presents a big advantage for me. I'm not a pro, but I do make a lot of great spotify playlists for parties and beatmatching all the tracks is a great way to take things to the next level. I've also got a nice LED strip setup using an enttec open DMX module. A wrinkle in the arrangement is that the functionality to output beat signals is completely absent from Djay Pro. Fortunately, I'm a software developer so I've written something fairly simple in C# that, over VNC (djay pro runs on a mac, lightjams on a PC) communicates the beat signals as perceived on the UI. This part works surprisingly well. I get on-time beat signals on my PC from DJay pro on the mac. Now it's time to get those signals into Lightjams.

So my question is, which of the various options for inputting external signals into Lightjams is likely to be the most ideal for the simple purpose of sending a well-timed signal on each downbeat to sync the lights to the music? I see MIDI as an option, but I've heard that setting up virtual MIDI interfaces on a PC is not that easy. Does that leave OSC and TUIO (which just seems to be a protocol over OSC?).

Thanks in advance!

[Mathieu]

Hi Michael,

OSC is the way to go. You can use a c# library like this one: https://github.com/ValdemarOrn/SharpOSC

Lightjams can receive any number types - int, float, double. Most software send float values between 0 and 1.

Mahtieu

[isaac]

Hi Michael,

Just throwing in my two cents.

If you want to use the beat-detection built-in LJ instead of having to code your own,  you can use an audio cable from you Mac (or audio console) to your PC (line-in) and let LJ do the work.

Otherwise, you mentioned that you already managed to get on-time signals on the PC, what format are they in at the moment?

isaac

[Michael Goldberg]

This worked great. Thanks very much for the library suggestion, it was exceptionally easy to use.