--- title: "v1.0.52 - The Hydra Update | DMXDesktop Changelog" description: "DMXDesktop v1.0.52 release notes: Live Wire, Milkdrop-compatible visuals, the Pro Scheduler, DMX Doctor, the Show Timeline and the Stream Deck plugin." canonical: https://www.dmxdesktop.com/changelog/v1-0-52 lang: en source: /changelog/v1-0-52 --- [← Back to Changelog](/changelog) ![v1.0.52 The Hydra Update](/assets/images/optimized/v1-0-52-400w.jpeg) # v1.0.52 - The Hydra Update Released Early September 2026 Live Wire listens to the room and runs the whole rig with nothing programmed, and a Milkdrop-compatible visualiser puts reactive visuals on your video wall. Behind them, a Pro Scheduler that lets an installation run itself, and DMX Doctor to tell you why a light is not doing what you asked. Auto Pilot is retired, and Live Wire replaces it. ## New Features ### Live Wire Point DMXDesktop at live audio and let it drive the rig. No cues to build, nothing to trigger. Band, DJ and Ambient modes each carry their own complete settings and palettes, and Hold parks it on your standby look between numbers without switching it off. Standard and Pro. ### Now Recognized While Live Wire runs it identifies the track playing in the room and shows it on the tab, artwork and all. Track identification is provided by Shazam. macOS only, and part of Live Wire, so Standard or Pro. Early, so treat it as something to try rather than to rely on. ### Milkdrop-Compatible Visuals A Milkdrop-compatible engine (Butterchurn) renders classic presets in the video window, driven by the same live audio the rest of the app hears. Browse presets in a preview grid, build playlists, import your own .milk files, and let presets switch on a frequency band you choose. Also renders on the screen source in the 3D Visualizer. Butterchurn is by Jordan Berg, used under the MIT licence, and each bundled preset keeps its author name. ### Scheduler Unattended, time-based control, so an installation or a venue can run itself. Anchor a schedule to sunrise or sunset and it moves with the season on its own. Priority layering, a week timeline, default and startup looks, closure dates with a reason, and Simulate to see what would run on any date without touching the lights. Per stage. Pro only. ### DMX Doctor One place to go when something is not working, in the main header, replacing the old Health tab. It checks your fixture setup and what is actually reaching your lights, explains each finding in plain language, offers one-click fixes you can apply in bulk and undo, shows what is genuinely going out on the wire, and reports problems that already happened rather than only what is wrong right now. ### Sources View The Output window now shows everything acting on the rig at once: sources down one side in the order they take precedence, the groups they are acting on down the other, and lines between them saying what each one is achieving. Where something is being blocked, the line is broken and names what is blocking it. ### Effect Cues on the Show Timeline Drag a whole effect cue onto the timeline and it fills in the clips for every group that cue covers, as a starting point you can then edit. Recorded Pan/Tilt sequences appear alongside the built-in effects, movement clips gain a Travel Time setting, and a gap on a movement lane now holds where the lights were left instead of recentring. ### Save Static Position Aim a group in Pan/Tilt Finder, save it as a named look, and recall it any time from My Recordings, inside an effect cue, or on the timeline. Travel In and Travel Out times let a recall read as a move rather than a jump. My Sequences is now My Recordings, with Static Positions and Sequences on their own tabs. ### Every Auxiliary Channel, Everywhere The Show Timeline, Quick Show and the effect cue editor each held their own short list of channel types and quietly skipped anything outside it, so a laser patched with Pattern Select, X Roll and Y Move offered nothing at all. All three now show every auxiliary channel your fixtures actually have. Option lists come from the fixture's own profile rather than a fixed table, and an option that covers a speed or an amount gets a slider named for what the value means. ### Programmer Channels Tab Direct access to the raw DMX channels of any fixture, for the times you need to set something the normal controls do not expose. ### Projected Gobos in 3D Gobos are now projected onto whatever the beam actually hits, so corners work and the pattern keystones the way real light does, instead of being painted flat on the floor. Beams and gobos stop at walls, frost softens the edge and defocuses the pattern with it, prism renders in the projection, zoom respects the real beam angle, and performers standing on the stage are lit. ### SoundSwitch Control One Full support for the Control One, including per-pad colours, the visualiser ring, the OLED status screen with live status and Ableton Link display, and both of its DMX outputs. ### Stream Deck Plugin A free first-party plugin puts DMXDesktop on an Elgato Stream Deck, with 34 actions covering live control, effect cues, Programmer cue stacks, QuickShow, overrides and DJ transport. The keys read live state from the desk rather than firing blind, so a key shows what the rig is actually doing. ## Improvements - Auto Pilot has been retired and Live Wire replaces it. Two music-driven automations side by side was more confusing than useful, and Live Wire does everything Auto Pilot did and a good deal more. Nobody loses anything: the two were available to exactly the same people. If Auto Pilot was doing something for you that you cannot reproduce with Live Wire, tell us. - Every screen now says what it is for, in ordinary language, with a Learn more link into the knowledge base. Explain mode, on by default on a new installation, swaps the short tooltip labels for full descriptions. A new Tooltips control sets how long tooltips wait, or turns them off, and a Notifications setting offers four levels of chattiness with errors never hidden. - Live tempo detection is significantly more accurate on difficult material: ballads, acoustic sets, brushed drums and live bands. A BPM Confidence meter tells you when the reading can be trusted. It takes a couple of seconds longer to settle at the start of a track, which is deliberate. - Half and double tempo are now one setting that the desk, MIDI pads, OSC and the mobile remote all share, with its own Tempo Control card in Settings. On a controller the three pads behave as one group with exactly one lit. - Position effects now orbit where you aimed the lights instead of snapping to the middle of travel, and re-aiming while the effect runs moves the shape with it. Effect Controls reports the centre position, the largest size that fits inside the travel limits, and a Fit to travel button. - On a multi-channel ASIO interface you can now choose which input channels are captured and which output pair the music player uses, with the real channel names from your driver. macOS input devices gain the same left and right channel selection, per device. Device lists are grouped the same way everywhere, input and output are clearly labelled, and audio a running feature depends on can no longer be switched off underneath it. - More from the mobile remote and connected apps: cue stack levels, group flash, QuickShow presets, Programmer faders and Live Wire mode. Remote surfaces now follow your plan, and a licence upgrade takes effect immediately instead of at the next reconnect. - Universes above 64 can now be used, so your numbering can match whatever your rig or venue already uses. - Truss you can actually build a rig out of: box and triangular profiles, corners at any angle from 30 to 150 degrees bending flat or vertically, three and four way junctions, arcs up to a full circle, and pieces that snap end to end. Group and Ungroup are buttons now, and object rows take Ctrl+click to multi-select. - MIDI controllers gain per-state pad colours set by right-clicking a pad in the visualiser, a blink option on any pad, and sensible default mappings out of the box on supported units. The MIDI log now shows the channel each message arrived on and marks any that matched no binding, which is the usual reason a controller appears to stop responding. - DJ Mode gains per-genre settings for energy, strobe, variety and timings, and a movement speed per group for heads that cannot keep up with fast pan and tilt, which effect cues respect too. Overridden groups are now clearly flagged. - Smaller download and install, much faster startup on a large show, and faster stage loading. - Konductor now shapes quiet sections instead of dimming the whole rig. It was working as a master dimmer: an intro was lit with much the same intensity, movement and effect activity as a chorus, only quieter. Quiet sections are now genuinely calmer, movement settles in them, and movement patterns are drawn from a pool that matches the section they are in. This changes how existing DJ shows look, which is the intended fix rather than a side effect. Pixel bars and RGB-only PARs were the worst affected. - Chase, Wave and Phased Pulse now run at the speed they should. All three cycled at half rate, so a single Chase pass on a pixel bar could take tens of seconds. Separately, the four Phased Pulse variants were producing identical output and travelling the wrong way, so whichever one you picked you have only ever seen one of them. Left to Right now travels left to right and Middle Out goes out rather than in. Shapes, spread and phase are unchanged. - Groups can have a colour. A rig split into a lot of groups looked identical everywhere it was listed, which made the DJ timeline hard to read at a glance. Each group now carries a colour, shown on its timeline swimlane, in the group lists and on the Group Overrides panels. New groups are given one automatically, spaced so that groups made one after another never look alike, and you can change it from Add Group or Edit Group. Existing rigs are untouched until you set one. - Live Wire now follows your rig while it runs. It used to take its picture of the patch once, when you switched it on, so a group added or deleted mid-session was ignored until you switched Live Wire off and on again. Every setting on the tab now shows which mode it belongs to, Tempo Level is remembered per mode like everything else, Group Overrides explain on screen what they are doing to the rig, and the Info tab now covers what actually differs between Band, DJ and Ambient. - Video walls follow the lights. A new Fade to black on silence switch on the Video tab takes the same silence decision the lighting engine makes, so a screen and a rig reach black on the same edge. One screen can also show both DJ video and the visualiser now, rather than being locked to one: DJ video takes the screen while the master deck has a video to play, and the visualiser has it back the rest of the time. - Cue points now show how long they last. Each is drawn as a band across its own duration, coloured for its type, so you can see when one effect is running underneath another. Drop triggers can also be switched off part way through a track instead of at the next one, and the drop type now reads the same in Show Options and on the DJ settings tab. - One bad mode no longer discards a whole fixture on GDTF import. A single mode that could not be addressed used to throw the entire fixture away, silently. Each mode is now read on its own and any that has to be dropped is named. Six more colour emitters are recognised as well, so fixtures with wide colour engines import their full emitter set instead of arriving as unidentifiable control channels. - Reset all genres at once from the Genres tab, rather than opening all fourteen cards one at a time. ## Bug Fixes - Fixed USB interfaces ignoring the output rate you set. Every USB output ran at 30 Hz whatever the universe was set to, and because 30 was the default the field looked like it worked. USB now runs at the rate you choose and the timing is considerably steadier. - Fixed an Enttec Pro leaving the rig dark and the app apparently frozen. Starting output ran an unbounded RDM scan that held the DMX bus, so with anything RDM capable on the line the lights never came up. The scan is now bounded and no longer holds up normal output. - Fixed colour presets doing nothing useful on wheel-based fixtures. Clicking any swatch gave red whatever you picked, and had done since April. - Fixed fixtures patching wide open and white, and colour and gobo wheels patching on the wrong slot. Wheels now rest on their open or no-gobo position, and that position stays selectable. - Fixed freshly patched fixtures running their own built-in show or their fans flat out. Speed, Auto Program, Fan Control and Effect channels had no resting value, so they were parked at full. - Fixed 16-bit fine colour and dimmer channels importing as a separate emitter at the wrong level and the wrong hue, and Warm White, Cool White and Lime importing by the name the manufacturer used rather than by type. - Fixed profiles losing detail on the way through the cloud library. Channel values were dropped, 16-bit pan and tilt was mangled, and pan and tilt were not recognised as such. Profiles now survive the round trip unchanged. - Fixed colour wheel movers flashing white on a solid colour cue. The first attempt only reached two effects; the wheel now holds its colour through dark frames on all of them, including every Chaser, both Sequencers, the Flicks, Twinkle, Meteor and Strobe Chaser. - Fixed the blinder pulling the whole rig to black for the length of its fade instead of releasing to the cue, and its fade time being read in the wrong units so it ran ten times too short. Blinder fade speed now reaches sub-second on a logarithmic slider. - Fixed saving a cue twice creating a second, broken copy that appeared in the list and fired from MIDI and the timeline but rendered black. Existing damaged cues are repaired automatically. - Fixed cue faders dimming the brightness you recorded into the cue rather than scaling it, and Colour Override reverting after a few seconds. An override now holds until you clear it, and clearing it restores the cue's own recorded colours. - Fixed Fan Tilt never reaching the lighting engine, and Fan Pan fanning whichever axis the effect happened to be moving. Existing cues are unaffected and keep fanning exactly as they did. - Fixed Manual Control not aiming some moving fixtures at all. A fixture with only one axis, such as a tilting moving bar, or one with several heads, got nothing from the position pad. - Fixed Traktor reporting the BPM it worked out when it analysed a track rather than the tempo actually playing, so riding the pitch fader left the lights at the original tempo. - Fixed the app failing to start with no window and no error when the Windows MIDI service was stuck, and "MIDI is unavailable" on a machine with no MIDI hardware at all. - Fixed six fixtures on an ordinary stage painting no light on anything, and moving the beam angle slider by a single degree swapping the look of the whole stage. - Fixed DMX output stopping for good if the lighting engine failed to start. It now recovers on its own. The app also repairs its database at startup rather than refusing to open, and warns you plainly if memory, disk space or open files run short. - Fixed updating on macOS leaving the app unopenable. The update now replaces the installed app in one move, keeps the previous version until the new one is confirmed working, and rolls back if anything goes wrong. - Fixed a deck starting silent after moving the crossfader, the last song playing twice with Loop off, and DJ Mode stalling while loading a large VirtualDJ collection. - Fixed around a hundred phrases appearing in the wrong language, some text being translated twice, and nine firewall messages missing from German, Italian and Polish. - Fixed VU-Meter never actually listening to the music. It had been running a synthetic stand-in since March, in effect cues, the Programmer and Live Wire alike, so it swept up and down while tracking nothing at all. - Fixed video on a 3D visualiser screen showing as a flat green panel. It affected every NVIDIA machine on every quality preset while the same file played correctly in the pop-out Video Display, which is what made it look like a visualiser fault. Once rendered, a plain video was also lit as though it were a still photograph, so it looked dull beside an NDI feed on the same object. - Fixed audio input selection on macOS doing nothing at all. The device you picked was stored and never bound to the capture, so detection always listened to the system default. System audio capture could also take the wrong stream or scramble it. On Windows, a non-ASIO interface negotiating more than two channels was read at the wrong stride and arrived as noise; ordinary stereo devices and ASIO were never affected. - Fixed the Decks tab vanishing for the rest of the session after switching to Live Wire, taking the master VU and crossfader with it. The deck header icons for overrides, cue points and timeline now work from the deck itself too, rather than only appearing once a track already had something saved. - Fixed a cue point effect being cut short by the one before it. A blinder placed inside a blackout ran correctly and was then killed part way through, without its fade out, when the blackout's own release came due. A short blinder now also spends whatever time it has going up, rather than reaching a tenth of its ramp and stopping. - Fixed picking a QuickShow colour theme switching the Colour Override on, which lit the navbar palette button, the bound MIDI pad and the mobile remote as though an override had been applied deliberately. Clearing the theme was worse: it switched an override on. Themes still colour your running effects exactly as before. - Fixed the per-channel Reset on the Live Controls tab pinning the channel at zero, so no cue or effect could drive it again. Grouped Reset and Reset All were never affected, which is why it read as only Reset All doing anything. - Fixed Edit Group refusing to save on any group created without a description, with no message to say why, and a deleted group leaving its DJ and Live Wire settings behind for the life of the stage. - Fixed switching stages applying the previous stage's inverted channels, and DJ shows rebuilding themselves on every single load whenever a genre's energy setting differed from the global one. - Fixed DMX Doctor reporting faults on hardware that works. Laserworld-family profiles were flagged for a mode the engine drives perfectly well, and a cold spark or CO2 machine whose only channels are a heater and an effect toggle was raised as an error to fix before the show. - Fixed PAR clusters casting no light on the floor, a colour wheel offering an empty slot picker, and an auxiliary clip holding its channel for the rest of the song instead of letting go when it ends. - Fixed a DJ plugin that failed to start leaving the disabled banner, the Enable toggle and the DJ Software Connection picker each reading a different source, so all three could disagree at once.