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Using Beam for Live to control Philips Hue lights

· 5 min read
Mary Letera
Mary Letera
Showsync
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Want to control your home lighting with Ableton Live? It's possible! This guide will take you step-by-step through the process of configuring your Hue fixtures to communicate with Beam so that you can create your own home compositions like this:

Using Shadertoy shaders with Videosync

· 6 min read
Miro Bollen
Miro Bollen
Showsync
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With the arrival of Videosync 1.1 (released in April 2022) using ISF shaders in Ableton Live has become a lot easier. The new ISFLoader device allows you to open any ISF shader example that can be found on editor.isf.video.

There is no conversion or editing needed for this, just download the zip and drag the included .fs file onto ISFLoader. Click here to see a video tutorial on how to do this and on how to map and control the shader parameters in Live.

But what might not be so evident, is that it is also possible to load most shaders found on Shadertoy.com into ISFLoader. This does require a little conversion, however. This article will discuss this conversion with a simple example.

A brief history of Showsync

· 8 min read
Mattijs Kneppers
Mattijs Kneppers
Showsync
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We have come a long way! The release of Videosync in 2016 may have been when you first heard about Showsync, when we could finally introduce the world of AV to two new concepts that we developed: warped video playback in the Ableton Live Session view and a standalone visual signal flow that follows the Live plugin chain. Or just in 2020, with the first release of Beam, when we introduced the first system for composing lighting shows from the Live interface that scales over any fixture configuration.

Updating pre-1.0 sets

· 2 min read
Jean-Paul Grobben
Jean-Paul Grobben
Showsync
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Now that we’ve moved to a new major version for Videosync (from 0.9 to 1.0), we’ve taken the opportunity to make some extensive updates to our plugins.

There were several outstanding issues, like misspelled parameter names or automation values, that we’ve wanted to fix for a while. On top of this, Videosync now uses the same Control Surface that Beam does: “Showsync”, while previously, it used its own Control Surface “Videosync”.

The downside of fixing these issues is that it breaks backward compatibility. This means that our existing users can’t replace the plugins in their existing sets with the new 1.0 plugins, or at least not with the chance of losing some parameter settings and automation envelopes.

As a solution to use Videosync 1.0 with older sets, we’ve made a special pack of plug-ins that look and behave the same as the 0.9 plugins, but are compatible with Videosync 1.0. They can also be used alongside the new 1.0 plugins.

Videosync 1.0 - a decade in the making

· 3 min read
Mattijs Kneppers
Mattijs Kneppers
Showsync
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Dear all, today, more than a decade after Videosync went on its first tour, five years after its first public release and three years after we launched the first commercial version, we are finally ready to bump the version number to 1.0.

You can now download Videosync 1.0 from the website! It is a completely free upgrade for our loyal users who have supported us over the past three years.

For those interested in the journey that led up to where we are now, we invite you to take a trip down memory lane with us in A brief history of Showsync.

Audiovisual performing with Ableton Live, Videosync and OBS on online streaming platforms

· 7 min read
Jean-Paul Grobben
Jean-Paul Grobben
Showsync
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In the past 10 years online streaming platforms have become increasingly popular, and as most nightclubs around the world are still closed, we are forced to find other ways to express our music to new audiences. With this first article and future articles on our blog we hope to inspire you with new possibilities and workflows that weren't possible before.

This first article will focus on the tools you can use to do an online audiovisual performance using Ableton Live, Videosync, OBS and Twitch. The online stage is still relatively new territory for musical performers, so I'm excited to share these new possibilities with you so you could do your own audiovisual performance, or simply use Ableton Live and Videosync as an the audiovisual engine for whatever you want to present online.