Guest guest Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Hi All,I'm new here, another of the noobs enticed by the Wizards of Winter video.So after christmas I decided I wanted to play with my brand new LOR box some more and I put together a little visualization plug-in for Windows media player that will control your LOR lights in sync with the music.It's actually pretty hard to get it to look good based on the frequency spectrum and waveform of the music (which is all you get) so its certainly not something you would use for a display, but its kind of fun to have your whole room lighting up with your music.Anyway, you can grab the plug-in from http://www.nopotatos.com/LORVis/Let me know if anyone actually trys it out, I'm curious to see if it works with other peoples setups.-Merit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Sounds interesting ... my LOR controllers are by the front door waiting to be setup in the home office, so one of these days I'll give it a shot ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Very Cool! ;) ... It worked fine, easy to install. I ran it on a CTB16D... It controlled the first 8 channels.I just happened to have a controller here to play with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Noticed one thing. If I click though the different effects and click OUT OF the LOR visualization all together then try to click back in (using the <- -> arrows) then the visualization hangs... ( This is great I get to bring up an issue for a change:D )... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 19, 2006 Share Posted January 19, 2006 Where did you get the protocol for the LOR boards? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 LightORama wrote: Noticed one thing. If I click though the different effects and click OUT OF the LOR visualization all together then try to click back in (using the <- -> arrows) then the visualization hangs... ( This is great I get to bring up an issue for a change:D )...I'm glad it worked for you. I guess I should have mentioned this is still in Beta :}I've seen that issue too, its some weird COM interaction between the plug-in and WMP. I'll take a look at it tonight (I don't get to work on this stuff all day unfortunately ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 wseay wrote: Where did you get the protocol for the LOR boards?It's just data going over the serial port, its not very complex.... :} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 Merit wrote: wseay wrote: Where did you get the protocol for the LOR boards?It's just data going over the serial port, its not very complex.... :}With LOR II we will start including an SDK with the software. This will allow people to use the LOR COM object to communicate with LOR controllers and not need to know the protocol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 That's very cool Dan, I was hoping you guys would do something like that. It seems that there are a lot of cool applications you could create.You should consided doing a .NET assembly as well, that would open it up to a wider audience since C# and VB are so much easier (and more fun) to work with than C++ COM.It will be nice to have access to full functionality too, I never could figure out how the time is encoded for fades Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 It Does Not Work With WMP 9! :( Is their anything to do?--Daniel LP.S.- I have access to xp but LOR is nto on it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 Daniel wrote: It Does Not Work With WMP 9! :(Hmm. It seems to work on my Win2K box at work with wmp 9, but I don't have an LOR controller here (unfortunately ) so I don't know if it's actually sending anything.Do you see the plug-in in the list of visualizations at all? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 Ok this is what I did to get it working...the .mis file (or .msi or .ims) cant open in 98se so I installed it on xp and moved the real file (the .dll) to the 98se and it WORKS! Im using ctb-008 so add that to the list of working controllers! Also it would be better if their were more com selections from the list, im on com4 so I have to type it in. The list only goes to com2! Thanks for your work on this project it works great!--Daniel L Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 Daniel wrote: Ok this is what I did to get it working...the .mis file (or .msi or .ims) cant open in 98se so I installed it on xp and moved the real file (the .dll) to the 98se and it WORKS! Im using ctb-008 so add that to the list of working controllers! Also it would be better if their were more com selections from the list, im on com4 so I have to type it in. The list only goes to com2! Thanks for your work on this project it works great!--Daniel LCool. I'm actually pretty surprised it works under 98 I think if you installed Windows Installer 3.1 the msi file would work.I was going to check the system to see what COM ports are available and fill the list, but its actually amazingly difficult to do that on Windows, so I just hard-coded 1 & 2 and left the box editable... I'll take another shot at it (or maybe just hard code up to 4 :]) It really should remember it too so you don't have to type it in every time...I'm glad so many people have checked this out. I thought maybe I was the only weirdo with an LOR box still hooked up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 Is their a way to keep the lights going when its minimized? Also the sound gets a little disorted when its running. And no you are not a wierdo cause im keeping my ctb-008 running all year!--Daniel L Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 20, 2006 Share Posted January 20, 2006 One more question, I know im using your program at my own risk and you have no intention on replacing broken equipment, so im going to be carefull and ask Dan and you Merit if this WMP plug-in is safe for LOR? what is the WORST possible thing that could happen? Does the Com Port have enough juice to fry a controller? Dan since you created LOR please help. Thanks!--Daniel L Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2006 Share Posted January 21, 2006 Daniel wrote: One more question, I know im using your program at my own risk and you have no intention on replacing broken equipment, so im going to be carefull and ask Dan and you Merit if this WMP plug-in is safe for LOR? what is the WORST possible thing that could happen? Does the Com Port have enough juice to fry a controller? Dan since you created LOR please help. Thanks!This plug-in cannot damage the LOR installed software nor will it mess up the serial port. As far as damaging a controller. It cannot be pyhsically damages regardless of what Merit's plug-in does. And, unless Merit were malicious and intentionally set out to screw up a controller by sending it brain scrambling commands then it is perfectly safe to use with the controllers.I personally see no risk at all using this plug-in and have it installed on my machine now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2006 Share Posted January 21, 2006 Thanks for explaining that Dan.I've been searching for the "make your LOR box explode in a huge fireball" command but I can't seem to figure out what it is I'm working on a new version with a little better configuration and the ability to control 16 channels, I'll post here when its done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2006 Share Posted January 21, 2006 Daniel wrote: Is their a way to keep the lights going when its minimized? Also the sound gets a little disorted when its running. And no you are not a wierdo cause im keeping my ctb-008 running all year!--Daniel LUnfortunately, there isn't a way to keep the lights going when its minimized. Windows media player assumes I'm just drawing stuff on the screen, so if there's no screen to be drawn too it doesn't call my code. The only suggestion I have is to turn off "Keep the player on top of other windows" in the options and leave it behind your other programs.The distorted sound could come from the plugin using too much CPU, leaving not enough to render the music. I'll put an option in there to not draw the graphics, that might help alleviate the load a little. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 2006 Share Posted January 21, 2006 I was discussing LOR with by brother who has a band and I told him that the sequences would have to be written in advanced. Well maybe not, anyway to adapt this to work with live music? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 22, 2006 Share Posted January 22, 2006 gremler wrote: I was discussing LOR with by brother who has a band and I told him that the sequences would have to be written in advanced. Well maybe not, anyway to adapt this to work with live music?I believe I heard Marty Slack plays live music that his stuff goes to. Hopefully he can jump in let us know how he pulls it off. I would imagine he has it all pre set. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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