Q Light Controller+

I am using the Show Manager to try and synchronise my light fixtures to a song. I created an audio "click track" to help with this process and then viewed the audio wave forms in QLC+. I aligned all the sequence steps to the "clicks" in the audio (visually) and then ran the show.

Unfortunately the audio synchronisation with the light sequence steps is very unreliable and the lights end up going out of sync with the audio track - they tend to be behind the audio and it's almost impossible to line them up. Visually the sequence steps line up with the audio "clicks" but when you start the show it's all out. Here is a screen show to show you what I mean...

http://www.chrismoses.co.uk/qlc.png

...you can see the audio click track as the third item down and the sequence steps above. They are all in line but when you run the show, everything slowly goes out of sync. The whole program appears to visually slow down when the Show is playing.

Also, sometimes I have to stop and restart the Show a number of times before the first beat of the audio lines up with the first step in the sequence. The yellow play head is also out I notice.

One thing that would be very useful is the ability to start the play head from any position in the timeline - to test my show I have to keep starting from the beginning.

Cheers,
Chris

Well, I never meant to say Show Manager is perfect (nor like Logic/Cubase/Ardour), especially because it's very difficult to deal with different OSes audio frameworks. (different decoders, latency, buffers, etc...)
One thing I'm sure of is that Show Manager is very CPU consuming when playing.
This is because a lot of events are fired to move that damn yellow head thing and to update the time. I can't help it.
I can also say that if you play a Show from the Virtual Console, it consumes 1% of CPU.

Said that, if you need to program a show over a BPM based music, then use the BPM mode (upper right corner drop down). I've added it on purpose for people needing it.
Time markers are more reliable than the audio preview. I have no doubts about it.

As for starting playback at any point in time...YEAH...it's buzzing in my mind since months. Unfortunately ideas are way different from the tough life of coding features
I'll do it sooner or later. Just be patient. It's a major rework of some QLC+ core functions

Thanks Massimo. I'm not complaining, it's a fantastic piece of software

I just thought I would give some helpful feedback to help you improve, I know these things take time. I myself am a developer and write software for the radio industry.

I forgot you could run a show from the Virtual Console... maybe I'll try that and see if it speeds up.

In the case of this particular music track, the BPM tool wouldn't help because it's a classical piece of music and the beats are very "loose" so I need to manually align the steps.

Chris, looking at your screenshot again, I realized you are using two overlapped audio tracks. I've never done extensive tests on that case, but I would say it's not supported. If it works, then any weird behaviour could come out, including crashes.
I also recalled that if you experience out of sync issues, you might try to change the audio file sample rate. (eg 44100 to 48000)

...meantime, I might have good news about starting a show from any point in time...

The starting a show from any point would be VERY useful. I'm setting up a light show to trigger at certain points for my band and watching the first 2 minutes of my light show for the 100th time is getting very time consuming only to find that I'm 1 beat off, etc...

Other than that, this is a fantastic program. 2nd day using it and I feel like I really got the hang of it.

Thanks again!

Sorry, only just realised you replied to my post again! I have tried it with one and two tracks, it still does the same thing. The light show slowly goes out of sync with the music.

So why would changing the sample rate from 44100 to 48000 help? Wouldn't that consume more CPU power because of the increased sampling? Just a thought