Music and Lighting Sequence Starting at Same Time

[halloween]

I'm creating a Halloween display where I want to play a music track and a corresponding light show at the exact same time, so that I can have lighting changes happen at specific points in the music.

Is there a way to have Freestyler trigger a .WAV file, where I could then feed my laptop's speaker output into an amplifier?

Or any other ideas for how to accomplish this?

[sirwesley]

If you are doing a yard display synced to music, there is a whole community dedicated to doing this, and I personally have had success with Vixen 2.5.

I hear there is a Vixen 3.0, but have not tried it yet. There was just an update in Sept 2012. Looks promising. Supports most any DMX controller as well.

http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/

This is also a good resource:
http://diylightanimation.com/

Hope that helps!

[Balk2K]

I've had success using a Digital Audio Workstation style program to fire MIDI messages to FreeStyler as it plays a song. You can map MIDI notes to different cue and override buttons and have them fire at just the right time. I've been using a program called Reaper to play music and send MIDI and you'll also need a MIDI loopback program to send it to FreeStyler. I was using CopperLan.