Release history

What's new in LMX.

New features land regularly. Every one of them is here, newest first.

Download the beta See all features

  1. 0.11

    Sound, a hazer on the stage, and effects you can see

    • A show can hold audio now, and play it. A new Audio tab takes as many tracks as you like, each with its own clock, Play, Stop and Remove. Several play at once and each one is independent, so pausing one leaves the others running. WAV, MP3 and FLAC, streamed off the disk as they play, so two hours of music costs about the same memory as thirty seconds of it and not a byte of your showfile.
    • Every track draws itself as a waveform you can zoom into. A proper timeline with a time ruler above it, from the whole track down to a thousandth of a second. Ctrl and the mouse wheel zooms around whatever you are pointing at, Shift and the wheel pans, and once you are in, a strip of the whole track underneath marks the visible part so you can jump across a two-hour recording in one click. The view follows the playhead while a track plays, and stops fighting you the moment you pan or zoom by hand.
    • The waveform's colour says what the sound is like, not how loud it is. Bass-heavy passages lean indigo, mid-heavy ones stay the desk's usual cyan and bright percussive material leans to a pale straw, so a bass drop and a cymbal roll at the same level look plainly different. Music with no strong character stays cyan rather than turning into a rainbow.
    • Dragging along a waveform really scrubs the track. The music goes to wherever you put the pointer down, the moment you put it down, and follows you as you drag, so you can hear your way to the moment you are after instead of guessing, letting go and guessing again.
    • Markers on a track, and LMX snaps them to the music. Press M while a track is playing and a marker lands where you are listening; drag its tab to move it, double-click it to name it, press ] and [ to walk from one to the next, or click one to jump straight there. They are saved with the show, Undo covers them, and they are stored as an exact position in the file rather than a rounded time.
    • LMX finds the hits in a track on its own. While a waveform is being built the desk also picks out the transients - drum hits, sharp attacks, chord entries, accents - and draws them as faint ticks along the bottom. A marker snaps onto one and lands within 4 ms of the hit, never after it, which is what you want when a hand on a key is always a fraction late; hold Ctrl to place one freely. It is not beat detection: LMX is not guessing a tempo, it is telling you where something actually happened.
    • A two-hour recording is drawn in twenty seconds and remembered for good. The waveform starts appearing a quarter of a second after a file is added and fills in from the left while the track plays. What it works out is kept against the file itself, so the same piece of music opens instantly in every show that uses it. None of it can disturb the show: zooming, scrubbing and analysing a two-hour file while four tracks play changed the desk's 44 fps Art-Net output by nothing measurable.
    • AUDIO at the command line does everything the tab does. AUDIO ADD, PLAY, PAUSE, STOP, SEEK, NAME, REMOVE, RELOAD and ANALYSE, with SHOW AUDIO for the engine's own figures: the output device, the decoders this machine can open, how much each track has buffered and whether anything has dropped out.
    • There is a hazer in the fixture library, and the visualiser makes haze out of it. Patch a Generic Hazer, point it with ORI and bring it up: a plume of denser fog leaves the nozzle as a column, breaks into rolling billows, thins as it travels and settles into the room's own haze. HAZE is how much the machine is putting out and FAN is the throw, from haze welling out of the grille to a jet driven six metres across the stage. It is a fixture rather than scenery, so it selects, stores in a cue and fades like everything else, and the programmer gives the pair a Haze tab of their own. The bundled Radlett show has one patched so there is something to try it on.
    • Run it for a few minutes and the whole room goes hazy - and the haze is somewhere. The room holds haze as a place rather than as one level for the stage: it fills from around the machine and works its way out, gentle currents carry it about, and the ventilation takes it away, so a beam crossing the cloud is noticeably thicker than one crossing the room beside it and switching the machine off leaves that cloud drifting and thinning where it stands. How hazy a machine makes the room, how long it takes to get there and how fast it clears are three separate settings now, saved with the show.
    • VISUALISER HAZE DENSITY is now how much haze there is. It used to set only how patchy the air was, which is why turning it up and down barely changed a beam and why a room looked hazy before anything had hazed it. Turn it up and the beams thicken; turn it off and what is in the room clears over the next few minutes the way a real room does. Your beams will look thicker than they did at the same settings - about 40% thicker at 0.75 - and VISUALISER BEAMDENSITY is the control to bring down to match an older look.
    • Every line of an effect now draws what it will put out. Open an SFX and each capability it drives carries a graph of the wave beside the controls that shape it, redrawn as you move them. It is the same arithmetic that drives the fixture, so it is what will happen rather than an impression of it, drawn in per cent of the fixture's range with the figure in the fixture's own units on the right-hand edge. Spread, wings and blocks fan the traces apart instead of being guessed at, and a running effect draws a live playhead across every graph with a dot on each fixture's trace.
    • An effect asking for more than the fixture can give now says so. Ask for a swing that will not fit and the desk used to throw the peaks away silently. The graph draws the flat top, lights the rail it is jammed against in amber, and prints how much of the cycle is being lost.
    • Chases have an editor at last, and a picture of what they play. A ribbon - one row per fixture, time running across, each cell the colour or brightness that fixture will be at that moment - with the steps listed underneath and edited in the cell like every other table on the desk. Colour, gobo, level, weight, fade and curve per step, and Speed, Phase, Step fade, Block, Scroll and Variance on sliders beside the picture. Steps can be different lengths and fade individually for the first time, and a chase option can be changed without retyping the whole chase.
    • The effect editor is worked with sliders, and says in words what it is about to do. Size, Centre, Rate, Phase, Spread and Width are the programmer's own sliders in the effects' magenta, laid out beside the graph so a value and its effect on the wave are in view at once. Across the top of each component: "±119° around the look · 0.40 Hz · fanned 0.50 of a cycle across 8 in 2 wings", with a chip saying whether it rides the look or sets a level outright.
    • The visualiser's shadows take the colour of your rig. The fill on every surface was a fixed grey, so a stage washed deep blue filled its shadows with the same grey an amber one did. Config → Visualiser → Ambient Bounce adds the light that has already left a fixture, hit the deck and come back: it takes the colour of whatever is lit, arrives mostly from below where an underside catches it, and rises and falls with the rig, so a blackout goes properly dark instead of sitting on a permanent grey floor. It starts at 0, so nothing you have already plotted moves.
    • LMX is installed from the Microsoft Store now, with no security warning in front of it. The old download from lmxlighting.com was unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen put a full-screen wall in front of it; a package published through the Store is signed by Microsoft and simply installs, then updates itself as new builds are published. It is the same application from the same build, and both share your shows, preferences, licence, imported fixtures and edited profiles, so moving from one to the other loses nothing. If you install from the Store and still have the downloaded copy, LMX says so once and offers to remove it. The direct download has been retired: lmxlighting.com links to the Store listing instead.
    • GO, STOP and KILL fire the instant you press them, rather than when you let go. They are buttons you hit on a count, and the desk used to wait for the mouse button to come back up, so a hand resting on GO waiting for the word took the cue late by however long it waited. Play, Pause and Stop on an audio track are the same.

  2. 0.10.1

    A fan you steer with one dial, new position looks and scene surfaces

    • A fan is one number: the spread, and its sign says which way round. The dial turns either side of zero, so PAN 0 FAN -40 is the same fan as PAN 0 FAN 40 the other way round, and Wings makes a mirrored fan that keeps working as the group grows.
    • New generated position looks. GENERATE PRESETS adds Fan Reverse, Wings 2 Reverse and Twist, and Diagonal now runs its pan and tilt in opposite signs.
    • Eleven new surfaces for scene objects. Brick, dressed stone, carpet, LED panel, table linen, marble, brushed aluminium, plaster, grass, red velour and black masking cloth.
    • LMX tells you when there is news. At start-up the desk gathers any messages that apply to your build into one window, each shown once.
    • Showfile file association. Double-clicking a .lmx file opens that show, in the desk you already have running rather than a second console.
    • USB DMX frame timing. Each break waits for the adapter to finish the previous frame instead of assuming it has, and SHOW USB counts the ones that ran late.
    • Art-Net broadcast addresses. Worked out from your network's real netmask instead of assuming a /24, and an address that cannot work is named as such.
    • Hang diagnostics. A desk that stops responding for eight seconds writes every thread's stack to ~/.lmx/logs/hang.log.
    • Default show folder. Saving and opening by name starts in .lmx\shows under your user folder, not wherever LMX was started from.

  3. 0.10

    Phone remote, framing shutters and a fixture editor you can read

    • Run the show from your phone. Any phone, tablet or laptop on the network gets three tabs: Playback with the whole cue list, GO, STOP and a held blackout, Faders mirroring the page the desk is showing, and Targets for capturing fixtures and dragging a target across a plan of your stage.
    • Turn the remote on with a setting, and open it by scanning a QR code. Configuration → Remote decides whether the desk serves the page at all, and shows the desk's address as a QR code while it does.
    • A target can be moved and saved from the command line. TARGET MOVE, TARGET SAVE and TARGET REVERT do live what the target editor has always done, so a target can be set by whoever is standing on the mark.
    • There is a mirror ball in the visualiser, and it throws real light. Hang one from Visualiser → Objects and every tile a beam lands on sends a pencil of that fixture's colour back out.
    • Framing shutters cut the beam in the 3D view. Push the blades in and the pool comes out framed, with the shaft in the haze cut to match and the edge softening with focus and frost.
    • A fixture editor you can read. The channel list is filed by what each channel does with a filter box above it, the mode's whole DMX footprint is drawn to scale, and the inspector holds one channel at a time.
    • A Head column, and a rest position you can drag. Every channel says which cell it belongs to, and its travel is drawn as a fader whose handle sets the default.
    • REPORT files a beta issue without leaving the desk. The window opens with the commands that led up to the problem already gathered and the show attached.
    • STOP and KILL are buttons. Both sit under each cue list, so fading a list out or cutting it dead is no longer a typed command.
    • Coloured gobos project their colour. A coloured gobo is a dichroic, not a plain mask.
    • Beam shape follows the lens. A strip lens throws a sheet rather than the cone every fixture used to fire.
    • Fixture shading. A fill light, a brighter-from-above ambient and each mesh's own smoothing stop dark bodies reading as flat cut-outs.
    • Lens flares no longer pop. They fade in and out, and stay inside the beam they belong to.

  4. 0.9.7

    A fixture editor that holds the whole fixture

    • New Segment and Capability detail panels. The GDTF attribute, the colour temperature a slot selects, prism facets, manufacturer slot names and a tint's neutral point can be read and written for the first time.
    • The emitter editor reaches the whole emitter. Depth, aperture radius, lit-face half-height, rectangle ratio and ring are all editable, where before only X, Y and head were.
    • Imported fixtures survive editing. Saving a GDTF-derived profile no longer drops everything the editor's own controls could not express.
    • Colour temperature, tint, hue and saturation channel types. All four are in the Type list, so they are no longer re-typed as "custom" on save.
    • Heads and emitter layout follow the mode. Switching mode switches both, so a multi-mode fixture keeps the cells each mode has.
    • The Multiply master picker labels its heads. Each row is offered the intensity master for its own head, and no master the fixture could not bind.

  5. 0.9.6

    Optics in the visualiser and ninety more moving heads

    • Frost, focus and the iris are drawn. Frost spreads and softens the beam, focus blurs either side of sharp, and the iris clips the beam smaller without making it brighter.
    • Ninety moving heads in the library, and forty more house fixtures behind them. The Robe MegaPointe, Clay Paky Sharpy, Martin MAC range and Ayrton line, each with its own 3D model, plus a bundled showfile with every moving fixture rigged on it.
    • Moving heads swing their bodies. The yoke and head move with the beam instead of staying bolted still, and three tilting bars tilt their heads.
    • Prisms are drawn. LMX has always driven the channel; the visualiser now shows the copies, indexed or spinning, at the fixture's own facet count.
    • Fixture bodies are matte black. They were light grey, and VISUALISER BODYBRIGHTNESS sets how brightly they are lit.
    • Standard level syntax. 1 THRU 8 @ FULL works, and the command line completes attribute names and states values in the fixture's own units.
    • No dropped frames when storing a cue. Editing the show mid-performance no longer costs DMX frames, and fades, effects and cue jumps run faster on large rigs.

  6. 0.9.5

    Colour temperature, tint and realistic light pools

    • Colour temperature and tint. A fixture's CTC or CTO channel now reads in Kelvin beside the colour picker, with a green/magenta tint alongside it where the fixture offers one.
    • A temperature scale that matches the fixture. Pick a temperature on a warm-to-cool slider, detented at the steps your fixture actually offers, without disturbing a colour you have already set.
    • HSI and HSV colour support. The colour wheel now drives fixtures that state their colour as a hue angle and a purity rather than by mixing emitters.
    • Light pools with a real falloff. Beams fall off to a lens-accurate soft edge, adjustable per fixture and switchable with VISUALISER POOL ON|OFF.
    • Temperature, tint and hue crossfade. All three fade like every other colour channel, and hue fades the short way round.
    • Faster start-up. Fixture profiles are read as they are patched, not the whole library up front.
    • Library updates reach existing installs. New factory fixtures arrive with every update, and your own imports and edits are kept separately and always win.

  7. 0.9.3

    A doubled fixture library and a bigger visualiser

    • The fixture library has doubled. ETC, Chauvet Ovation, Chroma-Q, Prolights and Strand LED house stock, every one shipping its own 3D model.
    • Far more lights in the visualiser. Light data now lives in a texture rather than in shader registers, so the ceiling is no longer your graphics card's to set.
    • Efficient multi-cell fixtures. Cells that share a colour and point the same way are drawn as one pool and beam cone, with nothing about the picture changed.
    • A colour wheel per lamp. Fixtures with a second lamp, such as the Rogue R3X Wash, get their own wheel and sliders for each.
    • Modes that cannot light in 3D say so. Patching one names the reason, and the Patch Wizard marks it before you choose.
    • Head selection feedback. Ask for a head a fixture hasn't got and the desk names the ones it has, leaving your selection alone.

  8. 0.9.1

    A searchable manual and more rep stock

    • Press F1 and you get a manual, not a text file. One window with a contents tree, a document pane and Back, Forward and Contents buttons that behave like a browser.
    • Search the whole manual, by feature rather than by name. "move in black" finds Premove and "no output" finds Troubleshooting.
    • References generated from the app itself. The command reference comes from the parser and the control reference from the running application, so neither can drift from the console.
    • Batch downloads from GDTF Share. Tick as many models as you like, across searches and manufacturers, and import the lot behind one progress bar you can cancel.
    • Far more fixtures, every one with its own 3D model. Theatre fixtures lead them, headed by the ETC Source Four in every barrel angle, with blinders, PARs, cyc units and floods behind.
    • Quick Access reads like a desk. Palettes, presets, SFX and targets each get their own scrolling row, and the right-click fader moves the light as you drag it.

  9. 0.9

    Show generation and visualiser settings

    • GENERATE turns a patched rig into a show you can run. One command, or the Generate button, builds the groups, palettes, presets, targets and SFX, or just the kind you name.
    • Look before you commit, and re-run whenever you like. A preview lists everything that would be built and why anything was left out, and generating again leaves your own edits untouched.
    • Groups that know where each light hangs. LMX works out the bars, side runs and booms from the rig itself and orders each group along the bar.
    • Position looks that stay editable. Fan-shaped looks are stored as a centre plus a fan intent, so they re-expand on recall and follow group membership.
    • Fans take wings and blocks. Split a selection into mirrored fans about its centre, or buddy neighbours together, in effects as well as in fans.
    • Every visualiser setting where you expect it. Render settings now have a home in System Configuration, alongside Playback, Art-Net and Performance settings that were command-line only.
    • A version number you can say out loud. The build number is no longer welded onto the version, so LMX calls itself v0.9 with the build alongside it.

  10. 0.8.1

    Quick Access and a faster visualiser

    • Quick Access puts everything you stored one click away. A new first tab in the programmer tiles every palette, preset, SFX and target valid for your selection, with a right-click fader to apply one at a percentage.
    • Visualiser performance. Running with the 3D window open no longer makes the desk sluggish.
    • Malformed numbers report and carry on. A typo no longer leaves your text stranded in the input box.

  11. 0.7.5

    Blind preview, MIDI pads and fader pages

    • Preview a blind edit in the 3D visualiser. Merge your blind look into the live scene or show it on its own, while the rig keeps getting the real look.
    • Map the pads on your controller, not just the faders. MIDI notes work alongside control changes, and feedback lights a pad while its flash button is held.
    • Learn a control instead of looking it up. Detect mode waits for you to move a fader, hit a pad or press a key combination, then fills the mapping in for you.
    • Fader pages. Each page is a whole separate set of playbacks any fader command can address, and faders left up on one page stay live while you work on another.
    • Steadier USB-DMX output. A sustainable frame rate and a configurable guard time clear up flicker at high DMX addresses.

  12. 0.7

    Show control and flexible saving

    • Open Sound Control (OSC) in and out. LMX can now exchange control and show data with other software, apps and hardware.
    • Hands-free cue sequences. Follow, delay and jump cues automatically trigger the next cue, and can loop parts of your show for unattended operation.
    • Export only the parts of a show you need. New save scopes let you export the patch, objects, everything but cues, and more.
    • Safe renumbering throughout the show. Renumber cues, palettes, presets, SFX and master frequencies without breaking cross-references.

  13. 0.6

    Licensing, networking and external control

    • Offline licensing. Offline licences let LMX run without a live internet connection.
    • Configurable Art-Net and sACN output. Enable either network protocol from the console and choose safer broadcast settings.
    • Central external-control mapping. Configure MIDI and keyboard controls from one dedicated place.

  14. 0.5.3

    Remote visualiser and better guidance

    • Standalone remote 3D visualiser. Run the visualiser on another machine, fed over Art-Net and synchronised with the console.
    • Keyboard shortcuts for any command. Map any console command to a key.
    • A command line that teaches you. A revamped help system and far wider command-suggestion coverage make the console easier to learn, and you can store and load looks straight from the cue list.

  15. 0.5.2

    Cue workflow

    • Complete cue management. Store, load, copy, delete and renumber cues directly from the console, including loading a cue into the programmer.
    • MIDI-to-command mapping. Trigger any command from a MIDI control.

  16. 0.5.1

    Targets, presets and the 3D scene

    • Follow spot tracking. Edit XYZ targets in real-time while the show runs with the Target window, ideal for operator-controlled follow spots.
    • Selection-aware presets and layered palettes. Capture exactly the fixtures you selected, then blend multiple palette and preset values together.

  17. 0.5

    Professional output and a richer visualiser

    • Professional output layering. Grand master, group masters and executor pages give you hands-on control over the show.
    • sACN (E1.31) output. Send synchronised network DMX with per-universe controls alongside USB-DMX.
    • A more realistic 3D stage. GDTF-accurate fixtures, textured surfaces, reflections, world-space haze and ambient emitter glow make previs feel more like the room.
    • Shadows! This was harder than we'd hoped! But we now have realistic shadows without impacting visualiser performance.
    • GDTF Share built in. Browse and download fixture definitions directly from the importer.
    • Live / Blind programming. Build looks without changing the stage output.

  18. 0.4

    Layouts, macros and show safety

    • 2D stage layout editor. Arrange a rig on a plan with multi-select, panning, selection boxes, snap-to-grid and venue objects.
    • Macros with loops and conditionals. Record, play back and script repeatable show sequences.
    • iPhone remote-control web UI. Run the show from your phone.
    • Automatic timestamped showfile backups. Protect your work, with configurable blackout and exit looks.
    • Realistic people and truss in 3D. Populate a scene with procedural figures, imported 3D models and truss.

  19. 0.3.3

    Focused programming

    • Highlight, Lowlight, Solo and Mute. Isolate fixtures while programming with a dedicated override layer.
    • Whole-interface scaling. Zoom the console UI in 10% increments.

  20. 0.3.2

    MIDI control surfaces and detailed fixtures

    • Full MIDI control-surface support. Map faders, GO and flash buttons, use encoder mode, and send mapping feedback to the controller.
    • Multi-cell fixture tools. Build realistic emitters with adjustable diameters and automatic layouts.
    • A comprehensive LMX user manual. Learn the full console in-app.

  21. 0.3.1

    Fixture patching and multi-head control

    • Patch Wizard. Set up a rig quickly with a dedicated patching workflow.
    • Multi-head fixture support. Program duplicated attributes across fixture heads together.
    • GDTF import. Import GDTF files and automatically create LMX fixtures based on their DMX capabilities.

  22. 0.3

    Palettes and USB-DMX

    • Palettes. Save and recall named looks with a full palette editor.
    • Configurable USB-DMX output. Connect the console to a serial DMX interface.

  23. 0.2.2

    Reliable cue playback and visual design

    • Reliable GO and premove playback. Out-of-sequence GO now resolves the correct fully-tracked state. Premove moves fixtures while dark in advance of the next cue so that movement is hidden.
    • Gobo slot picker with previews. Choose, validate and preview gobo files directly in the console.
    • A richer 3D scene. Stage enclosure surfaces, ambient lighting, lens flares, target indicators and larger moving-head models.
    • Diagnostics and showfile safety. Inspect the source of every fixture value and DMX byte, use panic and undo, and rely on autosave, backups and showfile recovery.

  24. 0.2.1

    Advanced chase and colour control

    • Advanced chase SFX. Shape step-based effects from dedicated GUI controls.
    • Named colour and gobo wheels. Work with swatches, RGB metadata and multiple wheels per fixture.

  25. 0.2

    Standalone 3D visualiser

    • Standalone 3D viewer. Previsualise volumetric beams, raymarched spotlights, projected gobos and lens flares with mirrored console controls.
    • Natural 3D camera controls. Orbit, pan and pitch around the stage.
    • XYZ target pan/tilt solving. Point fixtures at locations in 3D space.

  26. 0.1.2

    XYZ targets and showfile safety

    • Persistent XYZ targets. Store and recall a resolved 3D target position in cues, the CLI and on-screen display.
    • Showfile dirty-state safeguards. Get warned before losing unsaved work.

  27. 0.1.1

    Groups, faders and cue inspection

    • Base SFX capability. Drive pan / tilt with sine / cosine / triangle / square waves. Layer SFX on top of each other to create complex effects.
    • Group reference mode. Drive cues, faders and SFX from reusable fixture groups.
    • SFX on faders. Load effects onto faders with blend, HTP and intensity modes.
    • Live executor flashes. Release flashes smoothly even in the middle of a fade.
    • Emergency lighting. Configure a scene with a dedicated Emergency command so you can bring up house and stage lights instantly when an emergency demands it.

  28. 0.1

    Initial release

    • Complete graphical and command-line console. Program through patch tables, fixture and cue inspectors, fader banks and a full programmer, or use console-style commands with autocomplete, usage hints and suggestions.
    • Fixture patching and editing. Patch, clone, address, exchange and validate any DMX capability.
    • Tracked cues and cue lists. Build cue stacks with delta tracking, blocks, decimal cue numbers, cue parts, timing and labels.
    • Professional playback and programming layers. Run cue lists with GO, mix cues, presets, palettes, capabilities and effects on faders, and use flash, override, blackout and deterministic layer precedence.
    • Groups, palettes and presets. Select fixtures with reusable groups, save type-scoped palettes and multi-attribute presets, and update referenced looks throughout the show.
    • Effects and chases. Create waveform effects and step-based chases with spread, wings, blocks, phase, envelopes, additive layering and reusable templates.