What bothers me most about Soundswitch

Lighting & Visual FX SoundSwitch
1

The song analysis is terrible. Not even the song start and song end analysis is correct. I have 45,000 songs in my data store that I want to take with me to gigs. I thought, okay, I’ll just have them analyzed and see what happens. But nothing good happens. Please don’t get me wrong, I like Soundswitch and I use it a lot. But it’s not really fun this way. Is there a way to adjust the analysis somewhere or something like that?

I use about 56 chases, and if they all go wrong, it’s not good. I use two universes for my shows and have a lot of devices that I control with DMX, including lasers. But seriously, a drop-off with full light? Is that necessary?

Thanks in advance for your help,

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2

On top of that, there’s a major bug with the presets.

Currently, I’m only using autoloops. Autoscripting songs isn’t possible with this, especially when there are sections intended solely for effects.

My banks are set up like this:

  1. Slow ones for bridges and a bit of calm,

  2. More hectic with more energy,

  3. Lots of extremely fast strobes for EDM/Techno,

  4. A few special/beam effects.

With a few tweaks, it’s okay, but not what I expected.

Also, as you’ve already noticed, the phrase recognition is, at best… well… so far, none of them have been accurate – either usually a beat too early or completely wrong.

What bothers me most is the time and money I’ve invested, and the fact that support is no longer responding.

Greetings from cold, wet Germany,..

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3

Hmmmm, I came to read this to see what issue you had but neither of these comments are what I’ve experienced. It’s not perfect, but mine properly changes on the 1 and slows and speeds up where it makes sense. The auto scripts have worked great for me so far. Now I’m making my own presets based off those.

I’ve not changed many settings. I’m really curious by it hasn’t worked for you.

2 Likes
4

The bug was confirmed by support today, with the suggestion to use only two presets as a workaround, as they are less affected by the issue.

The standard positions are generally all directed towards the dance floor.

However, if you also have positions for, for example, lectern, the cake cutting, or other things that should be targeted using the static button, the current presets because the autoscripting inside of the songs access all positions almost randomly – regardless of the settings in the table.

To test it yourself:

If you leave all entries in these presets set to NULL and apply them to the song, the bug sometimes occurs immediately, sometimes only after several applications.

Positions are added that shouldn’t even exist, since they are all set to NULL.

If you only use the standard positions and don’t care where the lights move, it’s hardly noticeable.

It becomes problematic if the lectern or the wedding cake is suddenly illuminated in the middle of a song.

I have about 16 positions dedicated solely to the dance floor, but also in addition many for effects or targeted spotlights as requested by clients, which are only illuminated on a case-by-case basis.

This is standard practice at corporate events and presentations!

Furthermore, there’s bug number two:

Almost all presets can be saved, but in 95% of cases, the positions and attributes from the table are not saved.

So, if you call up this preset later, everything in the table might be reset to zero. Even the attributes!

To me, the entire preset system seems quite buggy.

That phrases aren’t recognized correctly doesn’t surprise me – very few can do that.

Currently, I strongly advise against applying the autoscript to songs if there are positions outside the dance floor that should only be illuminated on request, as the risk of incorrect lighting is very high.

5

Creating and customizing your autoscript presets is key to success. It took me weeks to build presets for different genres, but it’s worth it. I’m more than happy with the results.

One feature that I and many other users have been requesting for a long time is the ability to see in the browser which track uses which preset.

And an additional column for the “Genre” tag would be helpful.

6

Please, check this:

Regards

7

In the current version, saving customized presets is nearly impossible.

It initially appears to work perfectly, regardless of whether you assign a new name or keep the same one, but when you open the preset, the positions and attributes are almost always missing.

What’s particularly annoying is that almost all presets insert positions in the Songs even if they are marked as NULL in the table.

According to support, this primarily affects presets that also use chases.

Therefore, anyone who currently has working presets should definitely create a backup.

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8

The fact you can’t half the bpm sent to engine lighting/soundswitch. House/hiphop music works ok at its gridded bpm but higher bpm genres like dubstep and trap look better at half time. You should be able to change the light to react halftime without changing the beatgrid bpm.

9

I honestly have a much better experience with SoundSwitch after realizing that I can just have it do the on-the-fly lightshows.

It’s less buggy and less prone to just stopping randomly during a set. There’s no additional overhead or struggle. It seems to do just as good of a job.

10

I think a lot of things are being mixed up here. I can help you with some of them, but for others you’ll have to contact the manufacturer. But that’s exactly where the problem seems to have disappeared, at least in this forum.

11

I really miss the ability to treat multicell fixtures as separate fixtures. For example, when you have a strobe with a wash function, it always behaves as a single fixture on the timeline. As soon as you add some white to the RGB color mix, the entire strobe bar lights up, which limits creative control. I also find the pace of updates disappointing, especially compared to the rapid evolution of Engine DJ. It often feels like little to no development is happening in SoundSwitch, even though there is clearly room for both smaller improvements and more substantial updates.

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12

I’d be happy if the bugs were finally fixed. I’ve given up hope, though. Right now, I get the feeling that support doesn’t really understand what’s going wrong and only responds every ten days or even longer.

At least the autoloops work well, even if they’re often inappropriate in quiet sections if you’re not constantly intervening manually.

13

The fact the lights go dark when using a playlist is just insane. And as usual support say it’ll be fixed at some point in the next hundred years … maybe. I have no confidence in the product whatsoever.

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14

I completely agree about the fader vs. crossfader issue on the Prime hardware; it’s extremely annoying.

You constantly have to tug on the fader to keep it blinking.