Lights and Music

One of the biggest challenges (or rather most time-consuming things) I have to deal with every musical, pantomime, or concert-type production is making effective lighting in time with music.

The answer is, of course, time code and ETC Eos and QLab make this rather easy these days but it's still awkward setting up the actual cue lists and getting the timing right.

It's possible to create markers with applications like Reaper, export them as a CSV, and the convert this into something Eos can understand. There's also purpose-built tools like CuePoints.

CuePoints is incredibly useful, and makes getting cues into the desk really easy, but it also costs almost £200 which puts it out of reach of most amateurs I know (when asking to spend $5/day on QLab is often met with shock!), it's also way more than some need.

So, in the usual spirit of bodgery, I built something. To be honest 'threw together' is probably more accurate than built and this is far from polished, but it's functional.

Currently called WavPoint (a pun on Waypoint, and it only does Wav files), this is a simple browser-based tool which lets you mark up a sound file and export an Eos-compatible timecode file.

Hopefully it's useful to someone.

Try it, let me know what you think...