BuskMagic - Live lighting control system Copyright (C) 2019-2023 Sauraen
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Art-Net™ Designed by and Copyright Artistic Licence Holdings Ltd.
BuskMagic is in alpha! It has been successfully used by the author at several public shows, with no showstopping issues arising over 100+ hours of live use. However, there are still important features missing, and much more testing is needed to find additional bugs. (This is where you come in!) I recommend you evaluate the program's capabilities and stability for your own needs before using it in a live setting--remember, there is no warranty, meaning I do not guarantee that it will not crash during your show!
BuskMagic is an open-source program for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux that lets you control lighting effects live, in real time, during a show. It is designed primarily for fully live performance--where you do not have the opportunity to build specific looks or cue stacks ahead of time, but have to improvise the lighting along with music or other performance. This is known as "busking".
BuskMagic outputs lighting data over Art-Net, which is a UDP-based protocol for carrying lighting data over networks (typically ethernet). The destinations can be Art-Net nodes which you purchase or build, or other lighting controllers or software. BuskMagic does not have any artificial limitations on the number of universes addressed--it supports the same 32,768 universes Art-Net does. The practical limit on the number of universes is your CPU power--and your budget for buying Art-Net nodes (and fixtures)! BuskMagic is optionally Art-Net 4 compliant, supporting the handshaking and remote addressing schemes; or optionally non-compliant on a per-node basis, in which case it will skip the handshaking and just send DMX data to the selected IP address.
While BuskMagic may be fully controlled just from a computer, it is intended to be controlled from one or more MIDI controllers, which can be mapped to virtual "controllers" (buttons and knobs) in the interface. Any MIDI controllers which are visible by your operating system's MIDI API are supported--this is typically USB MIDI controllers/keyboards or dongles to convert to/from old-style MIDI. Control is typically bidirectional, where buttons and knobs/faders set values in BuskMagic, and BuskMagic sends the state of the controls back to the hardware controller to set LEDs or move motorfaders. Unidirectional control is also supported but you may run into issues using certain features.
Typical lighting control systems are based on "cues", which contain states of parameters for a subset of the fixtures. These cues are combined into cue stacks, and hardware buttons/faders control the execution of these cue stacks. While this model is perfect for theater situations and music performances which are prepared for in advance, this model can be very restrictive when trying to come up with effects live for a performance.
In contrast, BuskMagic allows you to map your hardware control elements (buttons/knobs/faders/etc.) to parameters of groups of fixtures. There is no "programmer" where parameters have to be carefully captured into--the state of your buttons and knobs directly determines the stage output. Then, there is a concept of "states", which are effectively "state saves" of the positions of all your buttons and knobs. When you load a state, the states of all your controllers change, and therefore the stage output changes too. You can directly begin editing the state further from there. You can also use "blind" to cause your control surface to switch to a different state for editing, while the stage remains on the original state.
A show in any lighting software is full of "values"--e.g., press a button and a certain set of dimmers get set to 0.5. In BuskMagic, a value like "0.5" here is a "MagicValue". This means, the value may be a literal number such as 0.5, or it may be the output of a channel. Normally, fixtures have channels, such as dimmer or gobo, which you connect your controllers to. But, you can also create "free channels", not associated with any fixture, which may be used as the source for MagicValues throughout your showfile. This allows for an almost unlimited amount of controllable dependencies and metaparameters of the effects you are creating--since these channels are driven by controllers, and those controllers can have other MagicValues, and so on.
For example, suppose you create a modulator which fades a group of fixtures back and forth between green and blue. You could enter 0.5 (hue green) and 0.75 (hue blue) into the "HiValue" and "LoValue" of the modulator. However, if you then wanted to change the green to yellow--so that the fade was now yellow to blue--in this case you would have to manually change the 0.5 to 0.25 (hue yellow). Instead, you could create two free channels, called "Color A" and "Color B" or whatever you wanted to name them, and set the modulator's "HiValue" to "Color A" and "LoValue" to "Color B". Then, you can set up additional buttons or knobs to control what "Color A" and "Color B" are, which would allow you to change "Color A" within the fading effect from green to yellow live. Of course this also means you can have "Color A" be the output of another modulator--and this can go as many layers deep as you like!
BuskMagic supports two types of USB-DMX dongles on Mac OS and Linux. Both are available for <$20 on eBay. It may not be clear from the item description which one you are getting.
BuskMagic should be able to see, but not successfully connect to, the USB to
Serial dongle out of the box. sudo usermod -a -G dialout your_username
should allow it to connect (may need to restart BuskMagic and/or reinsert the
dongle).
Add a file with a name like 71-usb.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/, with
contents:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="16c0", ATTRS{idProduct}="05dc", TAG+="uaccess"
Then sudo udevadm control --reload-rules and remove/reinsert the dongle.
BuskMagic should then see it. You can also try rebooting if that doesn't work.