Introducing Light Elf .10

[Frankr]

Hello all,

Falcon Pi conversion process is now fully vetted by David and he was kind enough to create me my own spot on the forum.

As many of you know I have been working on my own custom LSP export tool.  This tool is intended to export sequences created with LSP 2.5 to xLights and Conductor file formats.  In addition it can also be used to combine a set of smaller sequences into one larger sequence.  This particular use case can be very handy if you are using very high channel count shows.  Some users have reported issues with LSP running out of memory when working with many thousands of channels and video transitions.  Some of us work around this by breaking a song up into 20 second segments and then exporting each segment and recombining those segments into one final sequence to display.  As you can imagine that was a long and tedious process. 

I created the Light Elf to make that particular workflow easier to perform and potentially help anyone that wants to use xLights or the Conductor to run their show.

How to use:

First the Pre reqs:
!!!IMPORTANT!!! Make sure you are consistent with what version of the below libraries you download.  Python and wxPython must both be compiled for the same word length, be it 32bit or 64bit.

Install python 2.7: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.5/  --Don't use anything later than 2.7.x
Install wxPython: (Direct Download) http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wxpython/wxPython2.8-win32-ansi-2.8.12.1-py27.exe

Install xLights and define your xlights network layout : http://sourceforge.net/projects/xlights/

Download light elf files from:
https://github.com/pharhp/Light-Elf

launch a command line prompt in the directory where you place the files from the above light-elf link. (shortcut: in windows 7 hold the left shift key and right click on the directory. select "open command window here" from the resulting menu)

issue the command:
C:\python27\python.exe "light elf app.py"

Usage:
under sequences menu chose add sequences.
add the sequences you want to convert (If you plan to combine only add the files you want to combine, make sure they are in alphabetic order)
under options you can pick individual sequence conversion (each file becomes its own file) or combine (all are made into one file)
when all the sequences are converted you can go to file-> export.

You will be prompted to specify which file formats you want to have generated for you.

Under Options->settings you can specify a non default directory for where Xlights holds the information specific to your comupter.  You can also specify a directory used for the storing the extracted versions of your LSP sequences.  This can make it easier to cleanup the excess files created from extracting the LSP sequences.

If you are in combine mode you should get a pop up to select the media file you want to use.
If you select combine it should be the selected option when you restart the app.

The app will spawn sub processes 1 per cpu core you have in your system.  Each process will convert one sequence to use as much processing power as possible.

There you go.  I hope that people find this tool useful.

Best Regards,

Frank

[MyKroFt]

LSP sync conversion is off.

Check your lsptranslastion.py file and on line 41 if it has a value of 96, change it to 88.2.

Frank was given a wrong value and his git has not been updated yet.

Tony

[vincerules]

I am excited to start using your tool soon, does it support LSP 2.8 files?

Also, is there a way to run a conversion completely via command line?

[Frankr]

Currently the tool does not support CLI based use.  IT would be easy to allow it for single files but the multi-threading and batch processing would not be present.

Frank

[Steve Gase]

Frank,

I forgot to share my appreciation for your tool.  I used an earlier incantation 2 years ago to migrate LSP to xLights, but the other night I had problems importing the LSP-exported LMS file into xLights... there were errors in the import step.  I tried to import an LSP-exported conductor file...  it didn't produce blinky.

But, when I tried Light Elf at David's prompting -- perfect results with the very first attempt. Light Elf is good stuff!!

Thanks for your efforts.

At some point I should attempt to reproduce and provide feedback for the xLights import features... but that is another day.

[Frankr]

I think the issue is that the conductor output from LSP is broken. I think David saw the same thing as well. I thought we looked at the output into the file and saw that it was not accurate.

Frank

[Frankr]

Note: I updated the timing value used in conversion to use the 88.2 value (which I believe to be derived from 44.1 *2).  you can get the updated files through github.

Frank