QLC+ 5.0.0 Beta2 release

[Fishman]

I'll echo others with concerns about stability, a lighting console isn't like most software and a LOT of people notice when it crashes

Personally, I've not switched as the mobile-first design aesthetic does not fit my use case (PC monitor), I don't have use for the new 3D stuff, and audio trigger is missing. I appreciate all the development hours that go into this amazing software and look forward to moving to V5 if the UI gets some help as well as missing features are added!!

[Ajeholz]

Hello,
In principle, a fully executable version for the iPad would make my work a lot easier, without having to implement this via a web client or similar. This would certainly be a wish of many users.
When testing the beta 5, there were so many crashes that I could not continue to use it.
Greetings

[Tooters]

Hello and thank you to Massimo and everyone who has worked on this project. Over the past year I have poured hundreds of hours into programming and ever increasing hobby rig that is used at private raves. I love v4, I'm 95% happy with the feature set, and I'm fine tuned the entire thing both in the virtual console setup and in the nuance of how my midi controllers operate the software. It's extremely fun and intuitive and easy to teach new people.

I tried v5 out very briefly and am immediately turned off from it, for now. I want to help this project grow, but I am scared off by two things:
1. The intial popup warning.. it says not to use in production, and while not a commercial endeavor I want as few crashes as possible at my events.
2. The GUI changes. I understand the idea is to move towards a more touchscreen friendly direction. It will definitely take some getting used to on my end. But the oversized default widgets and general clunkiness of the main UI elements isn't making me excited to trudge through reworking my entire show file to fit v5.

Best wishes to you all

[Chrix]

Hi, I've a almost full 512 channel universe with moving heads, fog, pars, laser and special light effect fixtures, I will switch shortly to qlc 5 and write a review or give feedback. Pleas give me some weeks

[gmint]

Hello and thank you to Massimo and everyone who has worked on this project. Over the past year I have poured hundreds of hours into programming and ever increasing hobby rig that is used at private raves. I love v4, I'm 95% happy with the feature set, and I'm fine tuned the entire thing both in the virtual console setup and in the nuance of how my midi controllers operate the software. It's extremely fun and intuitive and easy to teach new people.

I tried v5 out very briefly and am immediately turned off from it, for now. I want to help this project grow, but I am scared off by two things:
1. The intial popup warning.. it says not to use in production, and while not a commercial endeavor I want as few crashes as possible at my events.
2. The GUI changes. I understand the idea is to move towards a more touchscreen friendly direction. It will definitely take some getting used to on my end. But the oversized default widgets and general clunkiness of the main UI elements isn't making me excited to trudge through reworking my entire show file to fit v5.

Best wishes to you all

These are both very valid points and I share this sentiment.

[HughT]

Hi!
Thanks for all your hard work!
The reason I haven't switched to v5 is that video playback simply doesn't work for me (at least on linux). Just a black screen... I use video a lot, so I thought I'd just wait a bit longer
But I also now have severe problems in v4 (tried several versions...) with video playback, where most video takes a few seconds to start playback, and I have found no solution or reason why that should happen...
Cheers !

[sbenejam]

Hi Hugh,
For the video playing in v5 take a look to this post. viewtopic.php?t=16128
For the video playback in v4 sometimes I observed this delays. When I opened a project with videos I going to each video in function manager and play it from there until it works without delay. Then normally it works without delay when QLC+ is in operate mode. I not worked with videos in stage for a long time, but you can test this workaround and report back.

[DizziD]

Hi,

I’m fairly new to lighting, being a soundie wanting to broaden my skills. Been looking at MagicQ for a couple of months but want to switch to QLC. Essentially to have MIDI without spending a years income.
I’ve been finding my way in QLC v4.x.
Stability is my concern for using v5. It takes a lot of time and effort to put a showfile together but if I can’t count on it, I can’t justify investing that effort. If I was a seasoned v4 user I might think differently but as I’m starting from scratch I had to choose one.
I did go v5 first but had lots of early crashes just patching and setting up the visualisation.
I have gone the MagicVis route for my v4 programming (unpopular choice, I know but I need visualisation). I have had quite regular crashes with v4 though I’m putting those down to concurrently running MagicQ. Actually getting into the venue with lights to run without needing a visualiser is a while off.
Given all this, is there a consensus that v5 is stable enough to run a small show, without visualisation?

Some features that are missing (or I haven’t found them yet) that tempt be back to MagicQ are virtual dimmers (pretty much essential), soft palettes and macros.

For context, I’m running Linux (Ubuntu 23.04) on a touch screen system with an Akai APCmini II.

[gmint]

Stability is my concern for using v5. It takes a lot of time and effort to put a showfile together but if I can’t count on it, I can’t justify investing that effort. If I was a seasoned v4 user I might think differently but as I’m starting from scratch I had to choose one.

In a word, no. I don't think I'm going out on a limb here to say that v5 is not stable enough to use for production: even the software itself warns against this.

[Yestalgia]

Some features that are missing (or I haven’t found them yet) that tempt be back to MagicQ are virtual dimmers (pretty much essential), soft palettes and macros.

Off topic but soft dimming can be done in a few ways:
Submaster in a frame or do what I do and run any colour stuff in an animation widget. Happy to go through it just shoot me a message.

[DizziD]

Off topic but soft dimming can be done in a few ways:
Submaster in a frame or...

Thanks. I worked out the submaster thing pretty quick after posting. I still think a virtual dimmer assigned to the fixture that behaves like any other dimmer through out the software would be much better.
Curious about the animation widget though. I've not used them as yet, but let's not go too far off topic on this thread.

[terrymiesse]

One thing after playing around a bit tonight... the "master" slider is no longer on the simple desk. It can be added on the virtual console, but would be helpful to have on the simple desk as well.

[gmint]

One thing after playing around a bit tonight... the "master" slider is no longer on the simple desk. It can be added on the virtual console, but would be helpful to have on the simple desk as well.

This is one of my favorite things about 5. I love that the master fader is optional now.

[JimR4129]

I put in some effort on trying out Beta 2 yesterday and today. After I figured a few things out, I was pleased with it. I'm running it on an dual Core I7 MBP early 2015 with MacOS 12. It sometimes crashes but seems to be OK. But I was able to import a QLC 4 program in and actually get some MIDI inputs, simulations going, and other things.

I should've looked to see if there was any fine documentation, but I didn't. I do like the drag and drop features but initially didn't recognize they were drag and drop. Drag and drop options such as matching Input and Outputs to Universes and matching scenes to virtual console buttons.

It wasn't immediately obvious that I needed to check off the selections for importing from another project file (such as one I brought in from QLC+ 4).

I also like that you can easily transform a simple desk configuration into a scene.

Keep up the good work, Massimo! Thank you

[Thierry25]

Hi Massimo,

First, congratulations for your tremendous work !

I am an absolute beginner in the DMX world, so part of my comments may probably not make much sense. Sorry for that.
For now, I just own a basic USB-DMX interface and a Stairville CLB5 light bar received 2 days ago

I started with QLC+ 4 and followed the tutorials (very well made by the way), I could begin to understand how DMX works and successfully create few test functions and chasers.
The workflow is quite intuitive and efficient, it is a little bit similar to a DAW.

Then, I saw this post and gave a try to QLC+ 5.
The interface and workflow are obviously different
It appears clearly that QLC+ 5 is designed to run on a touch screen system, and this is where I have a concern.

Touch screen implies specific gestures and consequently a specific workflow. While it is perfectly possible to transpose such workflow on a classical computer, it sometimes leads to counter-intuitive gestures and loss of efficiency. This is what I felt when trying QLC+ 5. Besides (maybe linked to beta version), it shows much less commands directly accessible on the screen than QLC+ 4.

More generally speaking, I am not convinced it is possible to get a touch screen app still working fluently and with equivalent productivity after being ported "as-is" on a classical computer.
For example, Garage Band DAW shares the same "background" but features a quite different user interface between an iPad and a Mac.
This also reminds me about Windows 8 initially showing a "tablet scroll" introduction screen. Microsoft quickly came back to the classical user interface following negative feedback from many users.

I do not know what you have in mind, but if your goal is to create an iOS/Android tablet app and have it working exactly the same way on a computer, this will probably bring new users to QLC+, but may also be a no-go for some of the existing ones.
That being said, I know it is complex and time consuming to maintain an app with two different user interfaces, but is there really a choice in this context ?

Thanks again Massimo for making such a great app available, and wish you the best for the future of QLC+

[RomainColt]

Hi !

I've seen this post and I was like : "wow, I didn't know I was actually expected to use this program since there is a big red warning on the opening" !
So I decided to give it a try. First, thanks a lot for the hard work on the topic. It's been a pleasure to work with QLC 4 and I hope a lot for QLC 5, the visualisation feature definitely being one of the most usefull thing I thought about (plus the Undo command), for not having to install all my stuff just for preparing a set.

Life is unfair, so the best thing I can give to you is feedback about the tiny issues I encounter and that's what I will do on this post. Maybe I'll simply edit this post at my pace, since I don't always have time for a huge review.

- Fixture editor : the fixture editor seems to be glitchy. Often, when I edit a custom fixture, and quit without saving it, it crashes. For information, the fixture was loaded into the projet when I tried.
- 3D View, Dimmer, and DMX control : I have two fixtures I created myself in QLC4 Fixture editor. The two of them represent moving heads, with about the same settings except the number of canals and thus, the DMX controls. Both have logically a Dimmer control, but when I set it to 100%, only one of the two fixtures light up in the 3D view. I can't get to understand it, yet the same canal preset is used ("Dimmer (IntensityDimmer)" - 'Intensity" )
- In the same idea, it would be cool to be able to change a device on the fly. I mean, if I update a fixture manually, as far as I don't change the number of canals, shouldn't it be possible to change the definitions of the fixture and remap automatically all the functions that were previously defined to the new fixture ? We could ignore channel order changes and let corrections for the user, but this would allow to keep all the objects within the set of functions they belong to, which seems more easy to maintain, for me.
- Removing fixtures from my QLC 4 project makes the project crash immediately.

[Bappoo]

I'd love to help and provide feedback but the whole d/l and compile process is scary, are you planning to release an installer I can use

[Prichy]

Hi there,
I thought I'd do some v5 testing and provide feedback as I see that you've had very little feedback. However, after spending 2 or 3 hours with v5 I haven't got very far. The GUI is very, very different from v4. It took me half an hour just to work out how to add a fixture, resorting finally to searching for it and finding a post on the forum. So I think the problem may be that the new GUI is so 'alien' to us that we at least need a few tips to learn what the thinking is behind how v5 works. On first sight, it appears very big and clunky, as if it's been designed for children. The little functionality I got to grips with appeared to be unnecessarily difficult to use. For instance, the single best new feature I found was the keypad on the Simple Desk. This finally allows the lighting operator to set levels quickly and efficiently without using the GUI - or so I thought. But I cannot work out how to use this via the keypad - do I really have to use the mouse to click each button in turn? So there's clearly something I'm missing about the way the new GUI has been designed and I feel that perhaps with a simple guidance document we could get on and start testing once we understand that. But without any form of manual or guidance it's very difficult to test as we don't know whether something is a bug, or if this is a new deliberate way of working. All I can tell you so far is that this is far less intuitive than v4, which I used to light a couple of very complex theatre productions. I must admit I'm disinclined to spend much more time with v5 until there's some guidance about which parts are considered ready for testing and what is not. I couldn't even get a simple virtual console slider working as I couldn't work out how to assign the channel. But again, I don't know if I've missed something and it's my fault, or if the way it's supposed to work is broken. I hope you understand the dilemma.

Thank you,
Prichy

[Landmine9446]

2) Remove the gray background on small icons; replace this with a light border (#eaeaea) and on hover light up gray (PC Users)

I'm working on some new Icons and will share these in a thread soon. Send me a message if you'd be keen to help

Absolutely; drop me a message. I'm on discord too!

[GGGss]

I'm on discord too!

And where might that be?