3. Pro applications that use sort of a hybrid between 1 and 2.
This includes a few products like Martin LightJockey and ShowCad artist. They are full featured, stable, and work well, but have a learning curve and are still quite dated.
Personally I tried FreeStyler, Chauvet ShowXPress, and finally landed at Martin LightJockey 2. I like LightJockey, it's quite a thorough program. But it's not being actively developed. It's written in Pascal, a very dated language that nobody seems to want to touch at Martin. It limits you to 100 fixtures, with 12 slots per cue (enough for me, but not for some). In addition, it's missing strange features, like using more than one MIDI controller in the software, or using MIDI faders in the software (you can do this using a third party add-on, whic is sadly buggy). Other than that it's solid and works.
But I wonder what the heck is going on in this industry? It's 2012, there should be an easy to use, cross platform light solution that does full MIDI, OSC, ART-NET... and has companion iOS/Android apps (sorry Martin, your remote doesn't cut it, yet) for this stuff, and external controllers that aren't just $5000 MIDI controllers. It all just seems, well, odd to me.
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