Does anyone know how to grab timing from LOR lms files?

[danj]

Does anyone know how to grab the timing from LOR lms files?   I would really like to pull the timings that I spent a fair amount of time developing in my lms files in 2013 and insert them into my XL4 files as new timing mark rows.   I plan to convert my AC mini trees to RGB mini trees and I want to keep my mini tree timing from LOR and apply that timing to my RGB mini trees in my XL4 files.   Any ideas??
Thanks!!!

[MrChristmas2000]

Until Nutcracker has the ability to show imported data in the Nutcracker grid I don't know of any way to accomplish it other than to build a list of the timing points and build the timing track inside an audacity timing file. It would be quite a timely effort at this time. I know because I have some sequences that I am looking at having to do the same timing translation.

[sean]

 Dan, is the timing in lot on its own track?

[Gilrock]

Until Nutcracker has the ability to show imported data in the Nutcracker grid I don't know of any way to accomplish it other than to build a list of the timing points and build the timing track inside an audacity timing file. It would be quite a timely effort at this time. I know because I have some sequences that I am looking at having to do the same timing translation.

To be honest trying to represent the imported data in anything other than a grid editor doesn't sound like a good idea to me.  Maybe if you went into more detail about how the data would be represented.  Are you talking about drawing a single row under every model and we sample all the channels assigned to the model from the imported data and do a color blend of every channel down to one pixel for every time division on the row?  I personally don't think it would look good and wouldn't give you what you really needed to precisely position an effect.

[MrChristmas2000]

It has been my understanding that as some point there will be the ability to work with incandescent elements on a channel by channel basis. These elements do not display effects as does our RGB elements.

A single channel would represent a single element, be it a snowflake, string of lights etc. Many people still have mini-trees that are composed of Red, Green, and Blue incandescent strings which would require 3 channels.

Since you know the structure of the incoming data at least by channel number, on off timing points and intensity level that information could be presented in each of a single channels in the grid. Much like Vixen, LOR or LSP does it.

As a side note it might also could extend to an RGB elements on a channel by channel basis for some manually created effects.

This would effectively eliminate having to bounce back and forth between two sequencing environments, which is a real pain.

[jnealand]

In my old vixen sequences the timing/beat track was simply a single channel with an "full on / 100% on" marked at key points in time.  If that channel could be imported as a "timing track" that would do it, with the "on" marking the beginning and ends of each timing section.  Code could just ask what channel do you want to have considered as a timing track.

[danj]

I was figuring someone may have taken a shot at figuring out how to extract the timing from LOR--I always used the "beat tracks" function--it sets up a "channel" in LOR where you can see the "on" marks against the waveform.

[MrChristmas2000]

The same code that it will take to convert the imported data from Vixen, LOR or LSP would essentially be the same code it would take to build a single track or multiple tracks in Nutcracker.

Multiple tracks would just be a call to the same code as it would take to process one.

Nutcracker already knows how to import and process the incoming binary data from either aa .xseq or .fseq file and merging it into a sequence built within Nutcracker then display it on preview models, it is just going to take some work on formatting it for presenting it in the grid and give one the ability to change that data.

[flyinverted]

How about opening the LOR LMS File and reading it for the timings?  They're in plain text like this:
<timings>
            <timing centisecond="0"/>
            <timing centisecond="5"/>
            <timing centisecond="10"/>
            <timing centisecond="15"/

Simple enough to copy that to a new text file, import into Excel, and strip out the text.
Create two columns of numbers and divide them by 100 to convert from centiseconds to normal seconds.

Save that new 2 column data to a new text file and import into xLights.

[MrChristmas2000]

If I am reading Dan correctly just importing the timing marks from within LOR is really not what he is shooting for. He has built some timing tracks where he has on and off effects stretched across multiple timing points to key his sequencing of effects from .

It is why I believe seeing a track showing on/off effects would be a good thing to have in Nutcracker as well as all the other incoming incan effects.

I am not a LOR expert but isn't the timing marks in LOR of fixed length such as 50ms etc.

[danj]

I am only really interested at this time in pulling in the timing marks from LOR into XL4.   I plan to convert AC mini trees into RGB mini trees, so I don't think the LOR on/off/fade/etc would really "translate" into XL4...   It would be kinda nice to be able to pull all the LOR data right into the XL4 sequencer, though....   Hadn't thought about that because I figured it wasn't possible.

I dug around in LOR a bit (I am not a big computer wiz...) and I did not really see a way to copy the timing marks and paste into notepad, excel, or similar place..

[Gilrock]

I was going to try to add a way for you to easily do this.  I thought I had it almost working yesterday but it's crashing on some LOR files and not others.  What I did was in the same spot where you can Import Audacity Timing I'm letting you select a .lms file and I parse through and then display a choice box with all the channels found in the file.  When you select the channel I parse again and import all the start and end times for each effect found on that channel.  You could do that step multiple times if you wanted to import markers from more than one channel.  But what I'm seeing is a channel like a beat track will only have certain cells marked so lets say it had something inside the first beat of every set of 4 beats your only going to get an effect timing imported for that first beat of every measure.  So if you wanted the other 3 divisions you don't get that from the data in that channel.  Anyways it seemed like I need to modify my code to use the more complex parser that we use to convert the file because it didn't crash on the same file that my simple xml reader object was crashing on.  It could have been something to do with the size of the file because it tended to crash on the larger ones.  Anyways I gotta spend some time working on sequences for a graduation show in a few weeks so my bug fixing and enhancements is going to slow down.

[danj]

Wow!   Thanks Gil.  That would be way beyond awesome to be able to capitalize on previous LOR efforts....