Awesome

afterglow-max

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A package for hosting Afterglow inside Cycling ‘74’s Max.

Getting Help

Deep Symmetry’s projects are generously sponsored with hosting by <a href="https://zulip.com">Zulip</a>, an open-source modern team chat app designed to keep both live and asynchronous conversations organized. Thanks to them, you can <a href="https://deep-symmetry.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/318697-afterglow">chat with our community</a>, ask questions, get inspiration, and share your own ideas.

Usage

The afterglow-max package provides a number of objects for monitoring and controlling lighting cues. They are all based on the mxj object since they are implemented in Clojure, like afterglow itself, and rely on the Java virtual machine environment that Max provides.

mxj afterglow.max.Cue

Controls a single Afterglow Cue, based on its coordinates in the Cue Grid, and sends updates about changes to its state. Lets you set initial values for cue variables when the cue is started by this object, and adjust their values while the cue is running regardless of how it was started. Sends updates about changes to those variables to its outlets while the cue is running, whether or not the changes came from within Max.

mxj afterglow.max.Cue

For more details, see the Help patcher, full Reference, and Examples within Max.

mxj afterglow.max.Eval

Evaluates Clojure expressions within the Afterglow context. Combined with message objects, gives you an easy way to make Afterglow do things that aren’t worth creating special objects for. Useful examples in the Help patcher include starting and opening the web interface, enabling a connection from a full-featured Clojure development environment for debugging custom effects, and activating an attached Ableton Push controller.

mxj afterglow.max.Eval

For more details, see the Help patcher and full Reference within Max.

mxj afterglow.max.Metro

Adjust and query an Afterglow Metronome, allowing you to control and respond to the musical time that is driving a light show.

mxj afterglow.max.Var

For more details, see the Help patcher and full Reference within Max.

mxj afterglow.max.NextFrame

Sends information about when Afterglow is next going to generate control values for the lights, allowing patchers to set up appropriate context, such as adjusting cue variables to be used in creating the frame. Also can be used to start or stop the light show by sending start and stop messages to its inlet.

mxj afterglow.max.Var

For more details, see the Help patcher and full Reference within Max.

mxj afterglow.max.Var

Sets and monitors the value of an Afterglow show variable.

mxj afterglow.max.Var

For more details, see the Help patcher and full Reference within Max.

Installation

Install OLA. Since afterglow-max embeds Afterglow, it has the same dependency on the Open Lighting Architecture, so you will need that installed before you can use it. (On the Mac I recommend using Homebrew which lets you simply brew install ola). Once you launch the olad server you can interact with its embedded web server, which is very helpful in seeing whether anything is working; you can even watch live DMX values changing.

:wrench: If you are using Max on Windows, see the Afterglow Wiki discussion about OLA options.
Set up an OLA universe for afterglow-max to use. The demonstration patchers and help files use universe 1 by default, so the easiest thing to do is set that up as a dummy universe. Of course, if you have an actual lighting interface and fixtures you want to play with, configure the universe to talk to them! The Using OLA page walks through doing this using the command-line tools; you may find it easier to use the web interface, especially the New UI (the link will work only once you have olad running). Even though the new UI is technically in beta, I have found it completely stable and more friendly and easy to work with than the older one.
Make sure you have an appropriate Java environment so that the mxj object in Max can work. Its reference page says “Using the mxj object requires that the host computer have a current version of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed.”

:wrench: This statement is, however, a bit dated on the Mac. Even the latest Max only supports the legacy Apple 1.6 JVM, which you need to install separately even if you have a current Oracle JVM installed, as discussed on this Cycling ‘74 Wiki page.
Download afterglow-max.zip from a <a href="https://github.com/brunchboy/afterglow-max/releases">release</a>, unzip it, and install the afterglow-max folder into Max’s Max 7/Packages folder (in your Documents folder). afterglow-max may also work with Max 6, or even Pure Data, but it hasn’t been tested with them. If you try, please let us know how it goes on the Wiki!

You should then be able to launch Max and experiment with the afterglow-max objects! Once you want to start patching your own fixtures and creating your own custom cues and effects within the Clojure side of afterglow-max, you will want to edit the file afterglow-max/java-classes/init.clj.

:wrench: If you want to use an Ableton Push controller, and are using a Mac, you will need to work around some bugs in Java MIDI support on the Mac. The Afterglow Wiki explains how to do that.

If you want to build from source, install Leiningen, clone this repository, and run lein uberjar. That will create target/afterglow-max.jar which is the compiled code. Copy that into MaxPackage/afterglow-max/java-classes/lib, and then copy MaxPackage/afterglow-max, which is the Max package, to the Max Packages folder as described in the last Installation step above.

:bulb: You can also create an alias of the MaxPackage/afterglow-max folder inside your Max Packages folder to avoid having to copy it from the repository every time you want to use an updated version in Max. The compiled jar file is set up to be ignored by git. This makes working from source much more convenient.

Troubleshooting

When afterglow-max has important events to report, or encounters problems, it writes log entries to the normal Max console; that’s the first place to look when something seems not to be working right. Following normal Max conventions, errors have a red background.

Since afterglow-max attempts things at frequent intervals, it throttles its output to the Max console, and limits the number of entries it creates there per minute. So if something is going wrong frequently, you may miss log entries in the console. And that is not the best place to try to read a Clojure stack trace even whent there is only one to look at. You can find more complete logs in the directory afterglow-max/logs/ in the Max Packages directory where you installed afterglow-max.

The Open Lighting Architecture’s web interface, which you can find on port 9090 of the machine running afterglow-max if you installed it in the normal way, can be useful in troubleshooting as well. You can see if the universes that afterglow-max is expecting to interact with actually exist, are configured to talk to the lighting interfaces you expect, and are sending DMX channel values that seem reasonable.

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License 1.0, the same as Clojure. By using this software in any fashion, you are agreeing to be bound by the terms of this license. You must not remove this notice, or any other, from this software. A copy of the license can be found in resources/epl-v10.html within this project.