Run a real night.
Everything on this page exists for one reason: at showtime, the visuals must do the right thing at the right moment, every time, with your attention somewhere else. Skim it once before your first gig; the DJ and venue trainers turn it into muscle memory.
Cues & shows — the timeline
A cue is a look with a duration: "this picture, for ninety seconds." A show is cues in a row. Build one in minutes:
- Add cues from your saved looks (or grab the current look as a new cue), drag to reorder, set each one's hold time.
- Press play — the show walks the timeline, crossfading between cues with your transition time. Loop it for installations.
- Jump anywhere: next / previous / go-to-cue work live, from the panel or remotely.
- Timecode chase: turn on Chase MIDI Time Code or Chase Art-Net TimeCode in Preferences and the external clock owns the playhead — the show follows the desk instead of its own hold times, and a stalled clock holds position rather than drifting. Both ship off. LTC is in development.
MIDI — hands on real knobs
- MIDI learn: click a control, touch a knob or pad on your controller — bound. Any control on the panel, any standard controller.
- Pads → looks: map pads to preset recalls and play your set's looks like a drum rack.
- MIDI clock: if your DJ software or DAW sends clock, Luxaudica locks its beat to it — no audio-analysis guesswork, sample-tight drops.
- Tap tempo: no clock? Tap the tempo on a key and the beat lock follows you.
OSC — the venue's nervous system
OSC is the simple network language lighting desks, DAWs and show controllers already speak. Luxaudica listens and answers on the local network — no drivers, no dongles:
- Control anything remotely: every look parameter, scene changes, preset recalls, blackout and panic all have addresses. A lighting desk fader can ride the visuals' intensity.
- Every address is published: the whole control map is on the OSC reference — copy what you need straight into the desk — or let the desk read it: with OSC control on, the map is served over OSCQuery and advertised on Bonjour, so VDMX and Chataigne list every control by name.
- Ableton / AbleSet: playing to a setlist? Point AbleSet's OSC Tracks at Luxaudica's cue and look addresses and each song or section recalls its own look — the chorus look arrives with the chorus. Reading AbleSet's setlist feed with no mapping at all is in development.
- Reaper — in development: a ready-made .ReaperOSC pattern so the visuals follow the DAW's transport without hand-mapping.
- DJ decks — in development: deck-aware beat and track info from a sidecar. Today the beat lock comes from MIDI clock, tap tempo or the audio itself — all three hold up on a club system.
- Art-Net timecode: the lighting world's clock. Enable Chase Art-Net TimeCode and the console's broadcast on udp/6454 drives the show playhead; the listener is read-only and ignores DMX on the same port.
Displays — one Mac, two screens
- Fullscreen output on any display (f), panel on your laptop. Multiple outputs run at once.
- Deepest color the display supports, automatically — 10-bit wide gamut with anti-banding dither on modern hardware. Big soft gradients stay smooth on the wall.
- Pick the quality tier for the room: Club (light), Tour (default), Festival (maximum, for LED walls on powerful Macs).
The showtime checklist
- Punch set for the genre — 0.4–0.6 house/techno, higher for bass music, lower for ambient.
- Macro reactive on so builds and drops steer the picture.
- First ten gallery slots = tonight's looks, in order, on number keys.
- Crossfade ~2 s (cuts read as intentional, dissolves stay musical).
- Beat offset trimmed once from the booth — flash ON the kick, not near it.
- Reduce flashing considered for the room and the crowd.
- Know your two red buttons: Blackout (set break) and Panic (guaranteed-sane reset). Both are on MIDI/OSC/AI too.
When things go sideways
- Visuals drifting off-beat? You're on audio analysis in a loud room — switch to MIDI clock from the booth, or tap tempo.
- Frame stutter on the projector? Drop the quality tier one notch. The perf readout in the panel shows headroom honestly.
- "Make it stop": Panic. Then breathe. The look is unchanged, autopilot is off, brightness is full, and you're in manual control. It ends a running session outright — that is the point of it.