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I have a long term project of room lighting that reacts to music. I've gotten my feet wet working with the LED strips already, but hadn't heard of WLED - sounds

I have a long term project of room lighting that reacts to music. I've gotten my feet wet working with the LED strips already, but hadn't heard of WLED - sounds extremely promising! Does somebody have an idea whether "real-time" music <-> light sync is feasible with WLED? I plan to have the audio processing happening outside the ESP32, but then I'm still concerned about the bandwidth requirements (driving ~300 NeoPixels), because ideally I don't want to just trigger "discrete" effects but retain full control. I just wonder whether WLED puts any significant overhead in there that I wouldn't run into with something hand-rolled...

whatusername 4y ago
WLED has sound reactive plugins for built-in effects. Looks like there's some new stuff in .14 for this as well -- but I haven't followed closely. Or if you wanted to externalise it completely - it supports DDP/E1.31 -- you could generate the required effect externally - and just send the commands over the network. That should do 40 updates per second for 300 pixels. Ideally send it over ethernet - but you could probably pull it off over a good wifi network.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  Thanks for the pointers! After digging a bit more, I found https://github.com/scottlawsonbc/audio-reactive-led-strip https://github.com/scottlawsonbc/audio-reactive-led-strip which looks like an excellent end-to-end setup that's also easy to explore further from. Can't wait to sink lots of hours into it :D
  - fieryskiff11 4y ago
    [dead]
sowbug 4y ago
Have a look at https://www.tindie.com/products/lixielabs/sensory-bridge-an-advanced-led-music-visualizer/ https://www.tindie.com/products/lixielabs/sensory-bridge-an-..., which uses the ESP32-S2, but not WLED as far as I know. I'm a happy customer.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  Thanks for the pointer! My own project is primarily about not just visualizing a plain FFT, because it is so far removed from actual music perception, especially as soon as you have more than a single voice/instrument. So while I've grown quite a distaste for the exact thing Sensory Bridge seems to do, I appreciate people hacking in this space, and maybe someone else finds your comment who does enjoy the product :)

whatusername 4y ago

WLED has sound reactive plugins for built-in effects. Looks like there's some new stuff in .14 for this as well -- but I haven't followed closely. Or if you wanted to externalise it completely - it supports DDP/E1.31 -- you could generate the required effect externally - and just send the commands over the network. That should do 40 updates per second for 300 pixels. Ideally send it over ethernet - but you could probably pull it off over a good wifi network.

MauranKilom 4y ago
Thanks for the pointers! After digging a bit more, I found https://github.com/scottlawsonbc/audio-reactive-led-strip https://github.com/scottlawsonbc/audio-reactive-led-strip which looks like an excellent end-to-end setup that's also easy to explore further from. Can't wait to sink lots of hours into it :D
- fieryskiff11 4y ago
  [dead]

sowbug 4y ago

Have a look at https://www.tindie.com/products/lixielabs/sensory-bridge-an-advanced-led-music-visualizer/ https://www.tindie.com/products/lixielabs/sensory-bridge-an-..., which uses the ESP32-S2, but not WLED as far as I know. I'm a happy customer.

MauranKilom 4y ago
Thanks for the pointer! My own project is primarily about not just visualizing a plain FFT, because it is so far removed from actual music perception, especially as soon as you have more than a single voice/instrument. So while I've grown quite a distaste for the exact thing Sensory Bridge seems to do, I appreciate people hacking in this space, and maybe someone else finds your comment who does enjoy the product :)