A "little" help needed with DMX

I got an error 404 from your link but from my reading, each step is not one fixture but all 16 channels (you can have more than one fixture per channel but those on the same channel need to be the same and they will all do the same as each other). Therefore it is 100 steps x 16 fixtures, bearing in mind what I said above.

Seriously, having tried programming with a hardware controller and now changing to a software controller, MyDMX, I would never go back. I don't know how much this stuff costs in the US of A but here in the UK I got a laptop from Amazon and the MyDMX dongle for little more than the cost of a semi decent hardware controller.

Our current show is 2000+ steps long and growing which MyDMX handles with ease. Also, as far as sound to light active, my experience using hardware controllers was that it was very hit and miss (even with our 3.5k rig speakers running at 80% output very close by) and best left onboard with the lights running master/slave.

Stevie_Ray_Vaugh:

Unless you're working with a click track and triggering MyDMX from a second workstation/laptop to ensure your scenes come up when they need to and you did your programming with a stopwatch, MyDMX is NOT going to meet your requirements. There is NO audio chase capability. You can use a trigger to MIDI controller(such as a drum trigger except maybe using a rbeath controller) or you could use a compresssor/gate/limiter and use the key input from say a kick drum to open the signal out to a trigger. BUT, this will be a fixed MIDI note on event, and as such will only be capable of triggering a single MIDI note unless you're doing something to make the trigger advance, but then you need to make your scenes trigger to the different note numbers.

A "step" is not a single light being used for a turn on or off. A "step" is one of possibly many steps(or 1 step) in a scene. A step can be anything needed, be it turning stuff on or off or otherwise adjusting values, such as X and Y coordinates, RBG mix values, dimming, strobing, color wheel or gobo wheel options.... No hard guideline. Multiple steps can be strung together to make a scene. Scenes can be as long as several thousand steps or just a single step.

If you don't need syncing and audio chase, MyDMX will be just fine. For the cost of one of those lower end controllers, you can get way way WAY more bang for your buck by going with MyDMX.