Questions

If you are having trouble getting started, or with any aspect of Afterglow, please edit this page and ask questions here. (If you aren’t seeing a response, you can also email the author, but starting here might help others in the future.) As categories of questions reveal deficiencies in the main documentation, that will also evolve and improve.

Getting Started

OLA and Windows

It wasn't until well after the first couple releases of Afterglow that I noticed that there is not yet a Windows port of the Open Lighting Architecture. That possibility never occurred to me; I am so used to the Mac being late to the porting party.

All is not lost, however. Even though Afterglow was designed with the idea that it would be talking to a local OLA daemon, and that remains the most efficient option, you do not need to port OLA to windows yourself, or wait for someone to do that. The next release of Afterglow will support some new configuration options to let you run OLA on a different host (current builds of the master branch already do). You can follow the Open Lighting Architecture's guidelines for how to work with it in Windows. There are three choices:

1. Run OLA in a virtual machine. This is probably the fastest way to get started, but will not give you ideal performance, and may have issues communicating with USB DMX interfaces, so a more practical and supported choice is to:

2. Run OLA on a Raspberry Pi. This will set you back around $50 in hardware and a little setup time to get the Linux and OLA image booting, but will let you actually run Afterglow light shows from Windows even in the absence of a finished OLA port.

3. Run OLA on some other Linux machine or Mac you have lying around, even when you are running Afterglow on Windows.

In any of these scenarios, you need to configure Afterglow to know where to find the OLA daemon, and make sure there is a fast, reliable network connection to it. As noted above, current builds of Afterglow support this, and here is how you do it:

(require 'afterglow.ola-client)
(reset! afterglow.ola-client/olad-host "172.30.246.32")

Of course you would use the actual address of the machine you have olad running on in place of the 172.30.246.32 in the example. As long as you do this at startup, before you try to create and start any Afterglow shows, it will find the OLA daemon at the address you have specified.

If, for some reason, you have olad configured to listen to a port other than its default of 9010, you can configure that in a similar way:

(require 'afterglow.ola-client)
(reset! afterglow.ola-client/olad-host "172.30.246.32")
(reset! afterglow.ola-client/olad-port 12345)

If you need to change only the port, because you are running olad locally but on a nonstandard port, simply omit the line which sets olad-host.

MIDI from Java on the Mac

Unfortunately, there are some long-standing bugs in the Java MIDI implementation on the Mac, and Oracle has continued to kick the problem down the road. The most serious issue is that System Exclusive messages do not work at all, which means that there is no way to update the text display on the Ableton Push controller, making the Afterglow binding for it far less useful.

That particular problem can be fixed by installing the Humatic MMJ MIDI driver. Even though their web page optimistically thought in 2009 that their driver was no longer needed, that is sadly still not true in 2015.

Place the downloaded mmj.jar in your /Library/Java/Extensions/ folder before starting Afterglow, and it will be loaded and used for communicating with the Ableton Push.

The MMJ implementation has fallen behind OS releases, and no longer supports hot-plugging of MIDI devices. So you will need to have all MIDI controllers that you want to use with Afterglow connected before you start it. We may end up writing our own updated version of something like MMJ to solve this, because our efforts to contact Humatic have so far failed, but it will take a few weeks of tedious JNI coding, and so far other aspects of Afterglow development have seemed much more interesting and pressing. If anyone wants to tackle this issue, or knows how to get in touch with Humatic, we would love it.

Defining Fixtures

Patching Fixtures into Shows

Creating Cues

Running Cues

Creating Effects

Mapping Controllers