The Lighting Controller

Hi,

we've been encountering a serious syncing issue when mixing a song that needs to be in beat with the lights. I've attached a video that shows up the issue. The 4 lights need to be in sync with the "One, two, three, four" in the song - just as the first part shows.

When moving the red arrow in the timeline, the music starts to be async and hence the lights are not showing correctly anymore. This leads to the fact that the scenes are wrongly positioned inside the timeline and hence are out of sync.

Please analyze and fix this issue. I can provide scenes/timeline/mp3 if needed.

And yes we are using the newest version with the newest fix file.

This seems to be a general issue when I check other threads, is there really no solution?

It renders the whole application useless if everything is out of sync.

Any workaround or fix is highly appreciated.

I have done a few more investigations and found that it seems to be caused by mp3 files that have a cover added in the tags. I will be doing more investigations and update this topic accordingly.

We strongly recommend using audio files in WAV format, the only possibility to be perfectly synchronized.

https://forum.thelightingcontroller.com ... php?t=3717
https://forum.thelightingcontroller.com ... php?t=3480

Even with WAV files and a cover added (yes this is possible), it is slow.

We will do some final tests tomorrow.

Using WAV files permanently is no option, we have around 1500 minutes of sound, which is around 25 hours.

If MP3 without cover is still too async, there might be a possible workaround to temporarily use WAV files for mixing and then replace them with the appropriate MP3s.

Is it possible for you to send us your ligntshow so that we can investigate?

Hi Niffo,

I've sent you a PM with all needed details

Thanks for your clear report and simple lightshow to reproduce the issue.
As assumed, we confirm that the issue comes from a combination of your MP3 file encoding and the Windows MP3 codec not being accurate when the file is not played from the beginning.
As suggested, we do not see any lag if we convert your MP3 file to WAV using Audacity.

Is there any workaround except for using WAV?

I have converted into WAV and we still have syncing issues. The computer is a gaming laptop and hence is fast enough to decode a simple mp3 in real time.

Reading through the forum this is something that is happening to literally everyone. Using MP3 should be an absolute basic feature in such a software and hence needs a decent implementation that is not always reloading everything into memory.

Any updates to how the file is cached / read are welcome.