Music in. Lightshows out.
Any music source. Any genre. Any setup.
Live, automatic, intelligent lighting that follows whatever's playing - no DJ software, no pre-programmed tracks, no console.
Live Wire is automatic DMX lighting built into DMXDesktop, included with Standard and Pro subscriptions. No DJ software, no pre-analyzed tracks and no separate hardware box: just a USB-DMX interface from around $15 and the rig you already own. It listens to any audio source in real time and drives the show automatically.
Every other way to automate your lights needs something first. Live Wire just needs sound.
Auto-shows that need VirtualDJ, Traktor or rekordbox
Live Wire reacts to any audio input - no DJ-software link required
Tracks you have to analyze or prepare in advance
It works live, on un-prepared music - streaming, vinyl, a live band
Hours spent programming scenes and chases
Pick a mood and turn it on - the rig performs itself
Lighting that ignores the room
Follows the music's energy, building and dropping in real time
Sound-active mode reacts. Live Wire performs.
From silence to a full performance in seconds.
Choose any audio input - your mixer, an interface, or your computer's own playback.
Band, DJ or Ambient. Each sets the feel and the colour palette Live Wire draws from.
Live Wire locks onto the beat and drives your whole rig, live, all on its own.
Forty seconds of Live Wire running a show, start to finish.
Intelligent, musical lighting - automatically.
Listens to the live audio and drives your lights as the music happens - nothing to pre-load or analyze.
Effects move in time with the music, locked to the groove rather than firing at random.
The show grows and relaxes with the music's intensity - bright and busy on the peaks, calmer in the quiet.
Senses tension building and the moment it releases, so the lights land the big moments with you.
Big hits get a punch - a flash, colour hit or beam accent - without machine-gunning the rig.
Notices when the music moves to a new section or track and refreshes the look, so the show keeps evolving instead of cycling one fixed loop.
Pulls from coordinated colour palettes that match the music and spreads them across your fixtures.
When the music stops it can hold the room lit, fade to black, run a cue or bring up a look you built. It picks straight back up the moment the music returns.
When the band talks between numbers, park it on your standby look. No strobes, no blinders, no movement, and the audio stays open so coming back is instant.
Most automatic lighting is built around a machine pulse: house, techno, anything four-to-the-floor. Put a ballad, an acoustic set, brushed drums or a live band in front of it and it starts guessing, which is why so much automatic lighting fires its big moments in the wrong place.
Live Wire holds tempo on that material. It follows a human drummer through a track that speeds up and slows down, and it tells you on screen how certain it is. When it genuinely isn't sure, it holds the accents back rather than firing them at the wrong moment.
It follows the players rather than expecting the players to follow it.
Ballads, brushed drums and loose pulses stay locked instead of drifting.
A BPM Confidence meter on the tab tells you when the tempo reading can be trusted, and it holds the big moments back rather than firing them on a guess.
Set the timings in beats and bars and they follow the tempo as it changes.
Switch Live Wire on and it identifies the music playing in the room, then puts the track, the artist and the cover art on the Live Wire tab. Nothing to type and nothing to look up. It listens to the same sound it is already lighting, so it names tracks nobody in the building loaded: a hired DJ on their own gear, a support act's playlist, or whatever is coming over the PA.
It does not need the track loaded in DMXDesktop, or anyone to plug into you. If the room can hear it, Live Wire can name it.
The card stays hidden until the first time it recognises a track, so it never sits on the tab as an empty box, and a track it has already named is not looked up twice.
Now Recognized runs on macOS only. There is no Windows version yet. It also runs only while Live Wire itself is running, so it needs a Standard or Pro subscription. It is new in this release, so treat it as something to try rather than something to build the night around.
Track identification uses Shazam. Listen on Apple MusicApple and Apple Music are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
Lighting a room shouldn't mean learning to drive a lighting desk first.
DMX has a reputation for being a trade of its own: patching, addressing, cue stacks, hours of programming before anything happens. That's the reason most people with lights have never gone near it. Live Wire removes the programming entirely, and the rest of DMXDesktop is built to explain itself while you use it.
Pick your audio, pick a mood, switch it on. That's the whole setup, and it's the same on the night as it was the first time.
Every screen says what it's for in ordinary language, and that explaining is switched on by default for anyone new. There's no manual to read and no tour to sit through.
DMX Doctor checks the whole chain, from your fixture setup to what's actually reaching your lights, explains what it finds in plain English, and fixes most of it in one click.
If you're still stuck, one button raises a support ticket with the diagnostics already attached, so nobody asks you to describe what your rig is doing.
Live Wire runs on a handful of fixtures or on thousands, and it adapts to whatever you have - it works out what each group of lights does best and uses it. From a single PAR CAN in a pub, to a full club rig of moving heads, washes, beams and pixels, to an install spanning hundreds of universes over Art-Net or sACN. Missing a fixture type? It simply skips that part, gracefully.
Most venues can't justify a lighting tech, so the rig ends up on a sound-active setting or switched off entirely. Live Wire runs the room properly instead: it reacts to whatever is playing, whether that's a playlist over the PA on a Tuesday, a hired DJ on a Friday or a live band on a Saturday, and it needs nobody to operate it.
The lights come up as doors open, run the evening on their own, and settle at close. Set it once and the rest of the week takes care of itself.
Ambient early on, DJ once it fills, Band when there's a live act. Each mood keeps its own complete settings and palettes, so switching is one control, not a reconfiguration.
Cap the brightness and movement speed so it stays comfortable rather than overwhelming, and leave strobe switched off, which is how it arrives by default.
No console, no cue list, no training. If it needs attention at all, the built-in checks say what's wrong in plain language.
A DJ with a USB stick, a band with no click track, or the house playlist. Live Wire listens to the same sound everyone in the room hears, so there is nothing for the act to plug into.
Start with the few lights you already have and add more when the budget allows. Live Wire works out what to do with whatever is plugged in, so a bigger rig never means starting again.
Dial in the look for your room and your set.
A band talking over a mic is still audio, and Live Wire will happily light every consonant. Press Hold and it parks on your standby look and stays there until you press it again: no strobes, no blinders, no movement. Live Wire keeps running and the audio input stays open, so coming back is instant. It engages the moment you press it whatever your activation delay is set to, because a control you reach for mid-sentence has to work mid-sentence. Hold needs a standby look to sit on, so it greys out and says why when When the music stops is set to Stay lit.
One control with four answers: stay lit, fade to black, run a cue, or raise one or more Live Edits you built yourself. Fade to black is the default. If you run Dark On Silence, Live Edits are the answer: a fallback cue is built from effects and Dark On Silence is what dims effects, so the two have never worked together. A Live Edit sets its values directly, so it stays visible.
Band, DJ and Ambient can each sit on their own pad, and so can Hold. Press a mode pad while Live Wire is switched off and it starts in that mode, so one button takes you from silence to a running rig. The same controls are there over OSC and on the mobile remote, so you can hand over from the stage or the back of the room.
A live feed on the Live Wire tab lists what it heard as it happens, so the rig's decisions are something you can read rather than guess at. Run one of your own cues underneath and Live Wire adds to it instead of fighting you for control.
The feed now fills in what happened before you opened the tab, so switching away mid-set no longer loses the run-up.
Comparable hardware solutions can cost anywhere from $800 and up, and they do exactly one job. Live Wire is software: it runs on the Windows or Mac you already own, drives the DMX gear you already have, and a lifetime Standard licence costs less than a quarter of that.
Faulty hardware means a repair or a return. Pack it, ship it, wait for the turnaround and hope it lands before the next booking. Until it does, you have no show and nothing to fall back on.
Any compatible laptop gets you running again. Install DMXDesktop, sign in, restore your show from cloud backup and carry on. Your licence covers two machines, so you can keep a second one patched and ready long before you ever need it.
Live Wire is part of every Standard and Pro subscription, at no extra charge.
DMXDesktop is free to download, but Live Wire needs a paid plan - it isn't in the Free tier.
Automatic light shows, answered.
Live Wire pairs proven lighting logic with machine-listening that analyses your live audio in real time - reading tempo, energy, build-ups and drops to drive the rig. So there's real machine intelligence at work; we just care more about the result than the buzzword: a show that feels like a human ran it.
Yes. Pick an audio input, choose a mood, and Live Wire builds the whole show live - colour, movement, beams and accents - with no cues, chases or programming.
No. Live Wire is software that runs on the Windows or Mac you already own, so there's no $800 single-purpose box to buy or carry. Add a USB-DMX interface (from around $15), Art-Net or sACN and you're running.
Install DMXDesktop on the computer you already own, add a roughly $15 USB-DMX interface, and turn on Live Wire with a Standard subscription. With no single-purpose hardware box to buy, it's the lowest-cost route to a fully automatic, audio-reactive light show.
Live Wire is included with both the Standard and Pro subscriptions, at no extra charge. It isn't part of the Free plan. DMXDesktop itself is free to download, so you can install it and look around before you upgrade to switch Live Wire on.
Yes. Your fixtures work whatever the brand, from a single PAR to a full club rig, and Live Wire outputs over USB-DMX, Art-Net or sACN. Any standard Art-Net or sACN node will do; USB-DMX interfaces need to be a supported model, so check the supported hardware list if you're unsure about yours.
Both. Most automatic lighting is built around a steady machine pulse and struggles with anything else, so ballads, acoustic sets, brushed drums and live drummers tend to make it guess. Live Wire holds tempo on that material, follows a band that speeds up and slows down, and shows you how confident it is. When it isn't certain, it holds its accents back rather than firing them in the wrong place.
That's exactly what it's for. Put a computer on the rig, set a schedule, and the lights come up as doors open, run the whole evening from whatever is playing, and settle at close. Cap the brightness and movement to suit the room, leave strobe off, and there's nothing for staff to operate. It doesn't care whether the sound is a house playlist, a hired DJ or a live band.
That's the normal starting point, and Live Wire is built for it. There's nothing to program: choose an audio input, choose a mood, switch it on. Elsewhere in DMXDesktop every screen explains what it's for in ordinary language, and if something isn't working, DMX Doctor checks the chain from your fixtures to what's actually reaching the lights, tells you what's wrong in plain English, and fixes most problems in one click.
No. Unlike systems that need tracks analysed in advance or a DJ app feeding them data, Live Wire reacts to whatever's playing live - a mixer, a band, streaming, vinyl or ambient playback.
Yes - DMXDesktop runs on Windows 10/11 and macOS 14 or later (Apple Silicon and Intel). Live Wire itself behaves the same on both. The one exception is Now Recognized, which names the track playing in the room: that is macOS only for now, because it uses Shazam music recognition on the Mac, and there is no Windows version yet.
Anytime. Live Wire is automatic by default, but you can cap brightness, movement and strobe, choose colour palettes, override any fixture group, or drop into full manual control whenever you want.
On a Mac, yes. Now Recognized identifies the music playing in the room while Live Wire runs, and shows the track, the artist and the cover art on the Live Wire tab, using Shazam music recognition. It is macOS only for now, with no Windows version yet, and it only runs while Live Wire is running, so it needs a Standard or Pro subscription. It is new in this release, so treat it as something to try rather than something to depend on.
Yes, that is what Hold is for. Press it and Live Wire parks on your standby look with no strobes, no blinders and no movement, so a band talking over a mic doesn't get lit like a chorus. Live Wire stays running and the audio input stays open, so releasing it picks straight back up. Hold is on the Live Wire tab, and can also sit on a pad, arrive over OSC, or be pressed from the mobile remote. It needs a standby look to hold, so it isn't offered when you have set the music-stops behaviour to stay lit.
You choose. "When the music stops" has four answers: stay lit, fade to black, run a cue, or raise one or more Live Edits you built yourself. Fade to black is the default. If you use Dark On Silence, pick Live Edits: a fallback cue is built from effects, and Dark On Silence is what dims effects, so a cue fades away where a Live Edit stays visible. Live Wire releases everything the moment it stands down, so nothing of its own is left running over the top of your look.
Yes. Band, DJ and Ambient can each sit on their own pad, and Hold can too. Pressing a mode pad while Live Wire is switched off starts it in that mode, so one button takes you from silence to a running rig. The same controls work over OSC and from the mobile remote, so you can start it, switch mood, hold it and hand back without going near the computer.
Download DMXDesktop and let Live Wire light the room. Included with Standard and Pro subscriptions.
Music in. Lightshows out.
Intelligent lighting that follows whatever's playing - no DJ software, no pre-programmed tracks. Point it at your sound and the whole rig performs itself.
