Nothing to install

01

The transform, on your terms

1/3, 1/6, 1/12, 1/24 or 1/48 octave; a transform from 2048 to 65536 points; Hann, Hamming, Blackman-Harris, flat-top or rectangular; 75%, 50% or no overlap. Blackman-Harris to see a quiet tone beside a loud one, flat-top when the amplitude of a tone matters more than its frequency.

02

It shades what it cannot resolve

The honest part

At fine resolutions the low bands are narrower than the transform can actually resolve, so neighbouring bands report shares of one measurement rather than independent ones — and the RTA shades that region rather than drawing it as if it were real. A 341 ms transform simply cannot give 1/48-octave detail at 30 Hz. Lengthen it and the shading recedes.

03

Spectrograph on the same axis

The spectrograph shares the RTA's exact frequency axis, so in split view the two line up vertically and a feature in one is directly above the same feature in the other. Peak hold per band, and Fast, Slow, Long or infinite averaging for noise measurements.

04

Three ways in

An input — a microphone, a measurement mic on an interface, a return from a console. Tab audio, which captures what another tab is playing. Or the pink noise generator, which runs in the page and is analysed without going anywhere near the speakers.

01

The reduction is the tool

Vertices are welded, coplanar triangles are flood-filled into regions, and each region's outline is recovered and simplified. A raked seating deck becomes one plane however many triangles the model spent on it; a box becomes six. Handing ArrayCalc the raw triangles produces a file it cannot usefully work with.

02

Prune and classify what survives

The CAD object tree comes through intact — DXF layers, glTF node names, IFC entity types — so you prune by names you already use. Alt-click takes a whole branch. Then say what each surface is, and the listener height follows from that.

03

It writes the quads ArrayCalc actually accepts

The hard-won part

An ArrayCalc quad is not four free points. It is a symmetric trapezoid in a specific local frame, and a quad written the obvious way is silently collapsed to zero depth on import — sometimes not until weeks later, when the object ends up inside a rotated group. Anything that cannot be expressed that way becomes triangles instead, which are unconstrained.

04

You can see what it did

The source geometry and the planes it produced are drawn in the same viewport, so the merge tolerances are something you check by eye rather than trust. The object count is broken down, including how many faces had to be split and why.

01

Reads the project, not a copy of it

Flown arrays, their boxes and splays, the listening planes and the room’s temperature and humidity come straight out of the .dbpr. Where the planes cross each array’s aim is the line the level is judged along — the same line ArrayCalc’s “Direct sound level vs. distance” plot follows, balcony and stalls both.

02

Rigging measured from the file

ArrayCalc stores each cabinet’s front hinge point, and the step from one hinge to the next is fixed for each box type. So any new set of splays is laid out exactly from what the file already records — every flown array in ArrayCalc’s example projects rebuilds from its own splays to within 0.2 mm.

03

A goal you can say out loud

The high bands you pick as flat as possible front to back — or falling at the rate you set per doubled distance — the bands running parallel to each other, and one low band tracking with them. Splays stay inside the family’s range, whole degrees, and can be kept growing down the array.

04

Back into ArrayCalc

Frame angle, splays, every cabinet’s angle and position and the lowest-edge height are written together, to the mirrored hang too if you ask, and nothing else in the file changes. Every proposed splay stays editable first, with the prediction following as you change it.

01

It follows the patch all the way through

The point

Getting from an XLR to a fader takes three hops on an X32 — a routing block maps eight connectors onto input slots, the channel picks a slot, and the preamp belongs to the connector. Assume channel 12 is fed by socket 12 and you get a confident, wrong patch list. In the test file, slots 25 to 32 are on the other AES50 link entirely and six channels reach no connector at all.

02

Head amps belong to the socket

Gain and phantom are stored against the connector, not the channel, because on a shared stage box that is what they are: one preamp feeding whoever is listening. A patch list that hangs gain off the channel quietly misrepresents which desks share it.

03

Your header, on every page

Logo, event, date, act, venue, production company, engineer and contact — none of which a console stores, so you type them once and they land on all three documents. Any key it does not recognise becomes another header field, so "Truck call" works without the tool knowing what one is.

04

It tells you what it could not read

The honest part

Every document carries a fidelity section listing what the adapter recognised but could not carry across. A show that converts with nothing in that list is one the tool genuinely understood; anything else says so on the page rather than leaving you to find out.

01

One track per input, mapped 1:1

The interface is asked how many inputs it has and the track list is built from the answer — no channel picker, no mapping to get wrong. Name each track, disarm the ones you do not want, and every armed input becomes its own mono WAV in a folder named for the take. Alongside them, a take.json recording the sample rate, the format, the length, how much of the head is pre-roll, and any gaps.

02

The take starts before the button

The point of it

Every input is held continuously — ten seconds to two minutes — so pressing record puts the audio from before the press at the head of the file. The soundcheck that turned out to be the performance is already on disk. It costs nothing to leave armed, because the pre-roll is not a second buffer: there is one lock-free ring shared with the worker writing to disk, and recording simply starts the writer at a read position that is already thirty seconds behind. Nothing is copied at the moment the take begins.

03

A gap costs content, never time

The honest part

If the disk stalls for longer than the buffer holds, frames are lost and nothing can prevent that. What this will not do is hide it: the hole is filled with exactly as many frames of silence as were lost, and its position goes into the take.json. Writing the surviving frames end to end instead would shorten every track by the same amount — perfectly in sync with itself, wrong against picture and clock, and impossible to find afterwards. The buffer readout during a take shows the fill, the worst fill, the slowest single write and any frames lost, so you can see the disk coping rather than hope it is.

04

A signal to check it with

A generated eight-channel test source, needing no interface and no microphone permission, running through the whole real chain. Input 1 is a 1 kHz tone at exactly -18 dBFS, so the meters can be checked against a number rather than admired — and a take recorded from it exercises the ring, the writer and the files exactly as a live one does. Three seconds, and it is the difference between believing this works and having seen it.

01

The show, laid out

Every unit and socket with what it feeds; each channel with its source, preamp, fader, pan, main assignment, processing on/off and its sends to every bus; the buses, DCAs and mute groups; the output patch; scenes and cues. Names, colours, patch, faders, mutes, pans, sends and memberships are editable in place.

02

A version on every save

Each save is a content-addressed version, the same rule the desktop library uses: saving the same thing twice records nothing. Select any two to see what changed, entry by entry, and restore any one — the restore is a version too.

03

PDF, CSV, label strips, Companion

A PDF with the desk and I/O, the input list, the send matrix, buses and outputs, DCAs and mute groups, scenes and cues, the import notes and the version history. An input-list CSV. Label strips as 300 dpi PNGs at the fader pitch you give it. A Bitfocus Companion page for the allenheath-sq, allenheath-dlive, allenheath-avantis or yamaha-rcp module.

04

Conversion, and writing back

Any desk to any other, re-keyed in the target's own spelling and held against its capacity — with every name that was cut, colour that was mapped, bus that was dropped named in the report. And two formats go back to the desk: an SQ show (input patch, scene names) and a CL/QL .CLF (input patch, channel names), written into a copy of the file they came from with the vendor checksum recomputed.

01

Flat or curved

On a curve you give the arc width measured along the surface, the way a screen is actually built, and the radius; the wrap angle and chord fall out of that. The optics are not the flat maths with a fudge factor — you need a wider lens than flat suggests, and the image is shorter at the tile edges than at the centre.

02

The array closes on the screen

Pin one blend and the solver derives the other so the array lands exactly: fit width sets the horizontal and derives the vertical, fit height does the reverse. Manual mode reports the spill or the shortfall rather than quietly correcting it.

03

The doubled region

Blend bands are covered by two projectors, and where a horizontal and a vertical blend cross, by four. All three are reported separately, in canvas pixels and as a share of the canvas, with the redundant pixels — the ones you pay for twice and see once — totalled.

04

Throw and lens

Required throw ratio per column, the lens that covers it, where it sits in its zoom range, and the horizontal shift needed. Two placement models: one projector per tile on its own axis, or the whole array stacked at a common point, where off-axis tiles need shift and a curve changes the throw column by column.

01

Lay out a wall

Pick a cabinet from the library or define a custom panel by resolution and receiving card. Fill a canvas, build blocks, or place tiles by hand. Every record in the library was parsed out of the manufacturer datasheet it names as its source.

02

Wire it up

NovaStar and Brompton controllers with their real port counts, input connectors and device capacity limits. Auto-wire in serpentine or column order to a chosen fill limit, or patch ports by hand.

03

Then check it

Overlapping cabinets, unpatched tiles, over-capacity ports, a device that runs out before its ports do, an input too small to carry the wall, panels that cannot reach the refresh rate you asked for, and chains that jump around the wall.

04

Capacity maths that matches the datasheet

The point of it

Controllers pack each colour into a power-of-two container, so 10-bit costs 32 bits per pixel and not 30. With those containers a single 0.9500 link efficiency reproduces NovaStar's three published MX40 Pro per-port figures exactly. The usual spreadsheet formula overstates capacity by about 7% — in the direction that gets you into trouble.

01

A canvas with the gaps in it

The point of it

Three 576 × 384 walls 100 mm apart composed as 1728 × 384 is the shape everyone builds and it is wrong: the composition has no idea the gaps exist, so anything moving across the array leaves the first wall and instantly appears on the second. The honest canvas is 1805 × 384, where the blank columns between the walls are composited into the dark. Out of it come the per-surface slice rectangles with the gap offsets already applied, so the Resolume composition and the input rects agree without anyone doing sums.

02

Pitch is almost never a round number

A cabinet sold as "P2.6" is 2.604166… mm, so the blank pixel count in a gap is a physical distance divided by a number with a tail on it, for every gap, with every later surface offset by the running total. Two equal 100 mm gaps can legitimately come out 38 pixels and 39 — each gap is rounded against its absolute position rather than independently, which is what stops the error drifting along a long row. The page reports the millimetre error it accepted on each one rather than hiding it.

03

Six ways out, all at the real raster

Resolume Arena advanced output, as the AdvancedOutput.xml and as preset forms. A guide plate in SVG and PNG at exactly the canvas resolution with the gaps shaded, to drop behind a PowerPoint slide or into After Effects and design against. PowerPoint slide geometry and a starter .pptx with the surfaces and gaps drawn on it. A CSV of every surface and gap. A JSON project file to save and reload. And a PDF report with a scale plan, for taking to site.

04

LivePremier pitch compensation

One Analog Way LivePremier screen spanning surfaces of different pitches needs each output told how much canvas its raster is worth, or a layer crossing between them changes physical size on the way. The two numbers per surface for Preconfig > Canvas > Pitch come from aquilon-pitch's engine, vendored as source — which carries the four things about the device that are easy to get backwards and still look right, each established by driving a simulator rather than by reading the manual: the ratio multiplies a raster to give its canvas footprint, so a coarser wall goes above 1.000; the field is an integer in thousandths from 0.100 to 10.000; an out-of-range write is discarded rather than clamped; and the footprint floors.

05

Ragged layouts still have gaps

Gutters are merged bands rather than adjacent pairs, which is what makes a layout that is not a tidy row still answerable: "the gap between A and B" stops meaning anything once the surfaces are staggered, but "the columns nothing lights" always does. Mixed pitches are handled too — the canvas defaults to the finest pitch present, so no surface is ever asked to show fewer pixels than it has.

01

A cut list Resolve links, not a rendered file

The point of it

The kept spans are laid end to end as a CMX3600 EDL whose source timecodes are offset by the clip's start TC, so File › Import › Timeline links every event to the clip already in the bin and the result is the ripple-deleted timeline with video and audio still linked. Nothing is re-encoded and nothing leaves the grade.

02

Review first, as markers

The marker EDL puts a coloured span on every silence and touches nothing else — Resolve reads it from the media pool's Timeline Markers from EDL. Step through them, delete the ones that are dramatic pauses, then cut. It is a level detector, and it does not know dead air from a pause for effect.

03

The timecode comes from the file

For MP4 and MOV the frame rate, the picture size and the start timecode are read from the tmcd track the way cameras and Resolve write it, from the box headers alone — a 40 GB ProRes file costs kilobytes. A phone recording has none and starts at zero, which is also what Resolve shows for it.

04

One decision, four files

The EDL, the FCPXML and the ffmpeg command are all written from the same frame-quantised spans, so they cut on identical frames whichever you use. Kept spans floor their start and ceil their end, so quantisation only ever keeps more, never less.

05

Or just make the file, in the page

The Render panel decodes the recording with the browser's WebCodecs decoders, re-encodes it with its H.264 and AAC encoders — hardware-accelerated where the machine has them — and muxes an MP4 on exactly the frames the EDL describes, streaming it to disk as it goes so there is no size limit. A 77-second 1080p file took seven seconds on an M-series Mac, and no ffmpeg build was downloaded to do it. The codecs are the browser's, so ProRes, DNx and MXF still go through the ffmpeg command.

06

Padding that never touches speech

A pre-head keeps quiet before speech resumes and a post-tail keeps quiet after it stops, so a word's attack and its ending survive the cut. Kept islands too short to be a word can be swallowed into the surrounding silence, and the silence at the very start and end is trimmed or kept as you choose.

01

Releases, bundled and checksummed

Each release ships in both firmware variants: the standard bridge, and the build that also makes the USB-C port a network adapter with a settings page. Every part is checked against its published SHA-256 before it is listed, and the list shows what each part is, read from its own header.

02

Or your own build

Choose the .bin files from an ESP-IDF build directory. Each is identified by what is in it, not what it is called, and put at the offset its kind belongs at. Give it only the app and it writes a blank OTA record beside it, so the unit boots what you just wrote instead of whatever it last updated to over the air.

03

It tells you what you are replacing

On connect it reads the chip, the MAC and the flash size, then the unit's OTA records and the app descriptor in the slot they point at, so the version it currently boots is on screen before anything is overwritten.

04

One gate for every write

The wrong chip, an app from another project, a bootloader anywhere but the start of flash, an app over the partition table, overlapping or unaligned writes: all refused by one check. The page runs it, the script that bundles releases runs it, and the test suite runs it over every bundled image.

01

Which way the ratio goes

Measured, not read

The manual gives pitch compensation four sentences and does not say which way round the ratio is. The ratio multiplies a group's raster to give its footprint on the canvas, so a coarser wall gets a number above 1.000 — established by writing pitchRatioH = 2000 to an output of a running LivePremier simulator and reading a 1920 × 1080 output back as 3840 × 2160. Fourteen such pairs are pinned as tests.

02

The finest wall is the reference

The ratio scales a raster up into canvas pixels, so the reference should be the group with the most pixels per millimetre: every other group is then handed more canvas than it has pixels and scales down, which a video processor does well. Pick a coarse group instead and the finest wall in the room spends the whole show upscaling. The tool defaults to the right one and says so when you override it.

03

What the field will actually hold

Integer thousandths, 0.100 to 10.000, three decimals and no more — and an out-of-range write is discarded, not clamped. The device says nothing, and the operator is looking at a field that still reads whatever it held before. So the tool refuses a ratio the switcher will never take rather than quietly reporting one it clamped.

04

The device floors, and it costs a pixel

pitchedWidth = floor(raster × ratio / 1000), measured four separate times against the values rounding would give. With the three-decimal field, that is where the drift comes from — and the tool reports it per group per axis, in canvas pixels and in millimetres on the wall, because that is the number that decides whether the rounding matters.

05

The screen drawn twice

The walls in the room above, the canvas below, at the same scale, so a mapping that is not uniform is visible rather than inferred. Alongside: the screen canvas the design needs, a plain statement when a blocked group makes it unachievable as specified, a CSV for the show folder, and the AWJ frames.

01

Any two give the third

One relation, three panels, and the one being solved is marked calculated. Type into that panel and it becomes an input instead — whichever group you touched longest ago takes over as the answer. So pitch from a resolution and a size, size from a resolution and a pitch, or the resolution a size and a pitch imply.

02

It names the ratio properly

The point of it

3440 × 1440 reduces exactly to 43:18, which is arithmetic rather than an answer — it is sold as 21:9. So is 2560 × 1080, which is 64:27. They are 0.8% apart, and it names both and then tells you which one you are holding. Two lookups do it: trade names keyed on the exact reduced fraction, then nearest-by-decimal with the deviation always stated.

03

A near miss is never called exact

1366 × 768 reduces to 683:384, which is not so much a ratio as an accusation. The useful answer is 16:9 — and the honest one is that it is 0.049% off, which is what it says. A whole-number input that did not match a fraction exactly is reported as nominal, with the error, every time.

04

Pitch that matches the cabinet

Pitch is centre-to-centre and every pixel owns a full cell, so physical width is horizontal pixels × pitch. A 168 × 168 cabinet at 2.9 mm is 487.2 mm square, not 484.3. The other convention loses one pitch across a whole wall — invisible in a spreadsheet, very visible when the last cabinet does not fit the frame. Units are read as written, too: 2500mm, 8′ 2 1/2″ and 16ft 4in all parse, and an explicit unit beats the dropdown.

05

PowerPoint slide sizes

A slide is a display whose pixel pitch is fixed by the export DPI, so the same relation solves it: slide size × DPI = pixels, either direction, reported in inches, centimetres, points and EMU. What makes it worth working out for you is that PowerPoint caps a slide edge at 56 inches and a 7680-wide wall wants eighty — so it picks the divisor and the export DPI that land back on the exact pixel count, and says when a shape is too steep to be a slide at all. For a 16:9 target it will usually tell you not to resize the deck: leave it on Widescreen and export at 288 dpi, and every template, master and point size stays where it is.

01

Eight patterns

SMPTE RP 219, 75% bars, a grid on your own pitch, alignment marks, LED tiles, solid fields, greyscale ramps and a 1px pixel check. Each can carry a burn-in — output name, resolution, pattern, your own text — and can draw the imported slice or port outlines on top.

02

RP 219 measured, not transcribed

The point of it

Published descriptions of RP 219 disagree with each other and mostly omit the code values, so the geometry and colours were measured off a real generator instead. Two traps there each produce plausible, wrong output: decoding HD to rgb24 applies a BT.601 matrix, which turns 75% yellow into 189,202,7 instead of 191,191,0 — and default chroma upsampling smears the band edges. Anything built by sampling that inherits the error.

03

One file per output, or one for all of them

A PNG per output at its native raster — one downloads bare, several as a ZIP with a manifest recording which file is which output, the level range, and any raster the app had to infer. Or a single composition-sized canvas with each output's region drawn and labelled: play it out and every screen should show its own name.

04

It asks which range you mean

Bars are defined in Y′CbCr, a PNG is RGB, and a PNG cannot record which convention it was written in — so the app asks and puts the answer in the manifest. Full 0–255 for a media server or GPU output; legal 16–235 for an SDI chain, where sub-black survives and the pluge is actually judgeable.

01

A slide size PowerPoint will accept

The point of it

A 7680 × 1080 wall at 96 dpi wants an eighty-inch slide, and the format caps an edge at 56 — a schema limit, ST_SlideSizeCoordinate topping out at 51,206,400 EMU, rather than a dialog being fussy. So the deck gets built at 16:9 and stretched, or built at close enough and letterboxed, and the first anyone knows is at the tech rehearsal. Wallslide builds at half size and records the export multiplier. The build scale is always a whole number or a whole reciprocal, because "build at half and export at 200%" is an instruction a person can follow at 2 a.m. and "build at 1/2.37" is not.

02

Keynote's limits are not PowerPoint's

Measured by asking Keynote until it refused, not taken from documentation: Keynote runs 200 pt to 8192 pt where PowerPoint runs 72 pt to 4032 pt. A 7680 px wall is 5760 pt, which PowerPoint must halve and Keynote simply holds at 1:1 — no build scale, no export multiplier, nothing to get wrong. The floor runs the other way: a 1080 × 160 ticker strip is legal in PowerPoint and impossible in Keynote at native size. That is a real reason to choose one application over the other for a given wall.

03

A template, not a deck

Twelve theme colours and two font names in theme1.xml, a slide master and four layouts — Title Slide, Title and Content, Title Only, Blank — with the event's logo and background on the master where they can be changed in one place. An organiser changes the theme and the whole deck follows, which is the entire reason to ship a template. Master text styles are scaled by the slide's width against PowerPoint's 13.333″ default, because a forty-inch slide with 44 pt titles has titles a third of the size anyone intended.

04

A safe area measured in cabinets

Where part of the wall is masked, the insets are given in wall pixels — the reason is physical, and "the bottom two cabinets are behind the band" is measured in cabinets rather than in percentages. Every placeholder in every layout moves inside them.

05

Test patterns at the wall's own raster

Optional, rendered at the native pixel count and placed full-bleed with the master's shapes suppressed, because a test pattern with a logo on it is a picture of a logo. Every pattern is labelled with what it reads: most diagnose the wall, two diagnose the chain. A 1 px checkerboard that comes back flat grey means something between PowerPoint and the panels is scaling — worth knowing, and not a fault in the wall. A deck that does not make that distinction is how somebody spends midnight re-terminating a healthy wall.

01

A resolution in, a whole EDID out

Simple mode writes the mode as a detailed timing, a range-limits descriptor sized to it, the name where every input menu will read it, and a CTA-861 extension carrying the standard video code when the mode has one. Pick the timing standard or let it choose — a mode that is a broadcast raster is generated as that raster, not re-derived from a formula that would give a different one.

02

Or every field, by hand

Advanced mode is the whole structure: identity, video input definition, chromaticity, established and standard timings, all four descriptors, the CTA-861 extension — video and audio descriptors, the HDMI and HDMI Forum vendor blocks, HDR metadata, colorimetry, 4:2:0 maps — and a DisplayID 2.0 extension. Open a .bin or paste a hex dump from anywhere and edit that instead.

03

The minimum interface that carries it

The point of it

Pixel clock, raster, line rate and payload, and from those the smallest HDMI version that will do it — 1.0–1.2, 1.3/1.4, 2.0, or which fixed-rate link — plus the DisplayPort rate at four lanes and at two, and whether DVI needs one link or two. 4:2:0 halves the character rate and drops 4K60 onto an HDMI 1.4 link; ten-bit pushes the same mode past 600 MHz and off TMDS altogether. Both are one dropdown away.

04

Twenty-one processors, and the mode you have to set

Cited per claim

Whether a processor takes a mode is rarely a plain yes or no. A dual-link input can cost you the neighbouring one. A 4K60 input can mean two cables carrying half the picture each. A card can be four inputs or two, depending which version of the port you switch it to — and which two ports survive is not always in the manual. Each row names the mode required and what it costs, and carries the document it came from, quoted, with the date it was read.

05

Compression and variable refresh, as switches

DSC and variable refresh are toggles, and both are real: they change the bandwidth arithmetic, they change which interface version is required, and they are written into the EDID itself. Turning compression on correctly makes every older HDMI input in the table say no, because a compressed stream only travels over a fixed-rate link.

06

It will open what you already have

A .bin, or a hex dump pasted out of xrandr, edid-decode, xxd or a C header — it works out which it is. A bad checksum is reported and the file is parsed anyway, because the dump off a device that is misbehaving is exactly when you need to look inside it.

01

Fits plugs the way a patch actually works

Twelve inputs and twelve sources is not an answer. Four cameras wanting the two SDI inputs is a no, and no amount of counting will see it — so every signal is matched to a specific connector, with the format checked against what that connector carries. A 4K60 source does not go into an older HDMI plug; 4:4:4 does not go down SDI; a DisplayPort link budget is checked as well as its clock.

02

Knows which sockets are not really separate

One popular chassis has outputs that look like two sockets on the back panel and are one signal on two connectors, and inputs where two sockets are an either-or. Counting the sockets overstates that machine by a third. Both cases collapse to one output, and the patch list says which connector to use and what the other one is doing.

03

Spends layers in each machine’s own units

One manufacturer charges a 4K mixing layer twice what it charges its smaller one. Another’s ladder runs one to two to four. A third budgets layers per output card, so a machine advertising sixteen of them still cannot put three on a screen that lives on one card. None of it is averaged into a house rule — the difference is usually the thing that decides the answer.

04

Treats layers on aux as a capability, not a preference

One switch, and it splits the field three ways: machines that build layers on an aux without touching the main layer budget, machines that charge exactly what an on-screen layer costs, and machines where an aux is a clean feed that cannot carry a key at all. With the switch off they all look alike. With it on, the shortlist changes.

05

Proposes the patch, and says where an adapter will do

Every machine that fits gets a wiring topology: which signal on which plug, which runs need a passive adapter and what that costs you, which signals arrive on more than one cable and have to be combined in configuration rather than just patched, and what is left spare. Machines that do not fit get the reason instead.

06

Suggests a card loadout when the stock one misses

For the chassis built from swappable I/O cards, a miss is only half an answer. The catalogue is searched for the smallest set of cards that would take the show, and the suggestion comes with the wiring that follows from it. It is capability-aware in both directions: five 1080p sources get one eight-plug card rather than two four-plug ones, and a single source gets a small card rather than the big multi-format one that merely has the right socket on it.

07

Saves, loads and prints

The whole configuration round-trips as XML that a person can read and hand-edit; a file with a mistake in it imports as far as it can and lists what it could not read rather than throwing away everything else. The answer prints as a report — input list, output list, compatibility matrix, topology, and every source behind the verdict — as a page or a standalone HTML file.

01

A list in, a folder out

The point of it

Paste a column straight out of a patch sheet — newline or comma separated — and every line becomes a card. The label on the card and the name of the file are the same string, so a thumbnail is identifiable from the filename alone, and the ZIP carries a manifest.csv matching file to source, size and colour.

02

Nineteen icons, drawn to be filled

Camera, video camera, projector, monitor, laptop, desktop, tablet, phone, USB stick, drive, playback, clip, slides, microphone, speaker, server, network, web — or none. They are drawn as solid silhouettes rather than borrowed from an icon set, because icon sets are drawn as 24px strokes and turn to mush filled at 250.

03

Whatever raster the frame wants

1080p by default, and per source you can override it with a preset, an exact pixel size, or an aspect ratio and a long edge. The layout scales on height rather than being letterboxed into a 16:9 box, so a portrait card or a 2056 × 1329 one is laid out properly instead of painting a small landscape island in the middle.

04

A colour per source, without picking forty

Leave the automatic palette on and each source takes a hue from its position, stepped by the golden angle so the ninth is not a near-repeat of the first. Every card is one base colour turned into a light centre and a dark edge by formula — there is no table of colours to get one wrong in. Override any of them by hand.

01

One line instead of a hunt

Screen, master, layer and multiviewer memories — recall, store, label and delete — plus Take. Ranges compose: "Recall Screen 1 Thru 8 - 5 Memory 7" is seven screens in one command.

02

It shows you what it will send

Nothing reaches the device until Enter, and the compiled device paths are visible before it does. A command that will not work is refused while you are typing it, with the reason.

03

Honest about what happened

An unqualified recall goes to preview, never to air. A recall of an empty memory is reported as empty rather than as success — the switcher accepts those silently and does nothing, which is the kind of thing you would rather find out now.

04

The same grammar on hardware

A keyboard, an X-Keys panel over WebHID, a Stream Deck plugin, and a Bitfocus Companion module whose preset library fills a deck with memory recalls — all running the same parser.

.zip

A folder per switcher

One directory per device, named after it, holding that switcher's config.xml — the same tree the desktop app writes to a folder you pick, delivered as a download instead. Unzip it onto a stick and walk the room.

.xml

A loadable ATEM profile

Matched to real autosaves

A <Profile> in ATEM Software Control's own format — element names, nesting and ordering matched against real autosave files. Load it with Software Control's own Load button; nothing here talks to the switcher.

.json

The fleet, saved

The whole fleet as one project file you can save, reopen and hand to someone else. It is written and read entirely in the page — Save downloads it, Open reads it back — so the fleet never leaves your machine.

.txt

A media manifest

Each device folder that has media-pool items carries a MEDIA.txt naming what belongs in which slot, and where you said the source file was. The browser cannot read a file from a path you typed, so it lists them rather than pretending to gather them.

01

The show, drawn

Every card and every connector with what is plugged into it; inputs, outputs and sources with their formats; each screen to scale with its outputs tiled across the canvas and the layers of any memory over them; multiviewer layouts with a source and a UMD per window. Labels, formats, layer rectangles and windows are editable — drag them.

02

A version on every save

Each save is a content-addressed version, the same rule the desktop library uses: saving the same thing twice records nothing. Select any two to see what changed, entry by entry, and restore any one — the restore is a version too.

03

PDF, test patterns, Companion

A PDF with the chassis and patch tables, every screen and memory to scale, the multiviewers, a glossary of what the settings mean and the version history. One labelled test pattern per output at its own raster, with arrows to its neighbours, and one per screen — downloaded as a zip. A Bitfocus Companion page for the barco-eventmaster or analogway-awj module.

04

Conversion with an honest report

Event Master to LivePremier or back, re-keyed in the target's own spelling and held against the model's capacity — with every feature that carried, was adapted or was dropped named. Capability tables cover Midra 4K, Alta 4K, LiveCore, PDS-4K and PixelHue as well.

01

A capture card at its real resolution

A UVC card advertises a list of modes and the browser picks a conservative one, so a 1080p HDMI card opens at 640 × 480 and simply looks soft — like a bad cable. Peephole asks the device for its capabilities, offers the modes it really supports, and asks for the one you pick. The size is requested as ideal, not exact: an exact request a card cannot meet throws and loses the picture, while ideal gets as close as the card can and then says how close.

02

It says what you actually got

The readout in the corner is what the stream settled on, not what was asked for. Ask for 1920 × 1080 and get 640 × 480 and it says so beside the number, because the difference between “this card is 1080p” and “you are watching it at VGA” is the whole point of looking.

03

Something you would leave running

The screen is held awake while a picture is up, and the lock is re-taken when you come back to the tab, because browsers drop it whenever the tab is hidden. A stream that ends — card unplugged, another app taking it — says so, rather than leaving a frozen last frame that looks like a working picture. Firefox has no wake lock, and the readout says the screen may still sleep rather than pretending.

04

Mirror, rotate, fit or fill — and it remembers

Quarter-turn rotation for a camera on its side, mirror for a presenter facing it, fit or fill for the stage; keys F, M, R and C. The device and mode are remembered by id and by name, because ids are rotated whenever the site’s camera permission is reset and the name is what finds the same card again. In full screen the bar and the cursor fade after a couple of seconds of stillness.

01

The data line, packed the way controllers really pack it

Pixels cost power-of-two containers on the wire — 24, 32 and 48 bits at 8, 10 and 12-bit — not three times the bit depth. That is the difference between a capacity figure you can hang panels on and one that overstates a 10-bit port by about 7%. With containers, a single link efficiency reproduces NovaStar’s three published MX40 Pro per-port figures exactly; with the naive formula no single constant fits all three.

02

Refresh rate is not bandwidth

A panel’s 3840 Hz or 7680 Hz refresh costs the panel, not the link: the frame crosses the wire once per video frame and the driver ICs re-scan it from local memory. Frame rate is the one that costs bandwidth, and it is what the tool asks for. The receiving-card ceiling and the processor’s own pixel cap are applied on top, because most boxes run out of backplane before their ports run out of bandwidth.

03

The power line, which almost nobody publishes

Panels per circuit from peak watts, the phase voltage and the breaker, with the 80% continuous-load rule applied by default. UK/EU and US supplies, single and three phase. Where a manufacturer does publish a figure — Absen are effectively the only one — it is shown alongside, with the margin they left.

04

Which one binds

The run you can build is the smaller of the two, and which one it is flips with the panel, the bit depth and the country. The tool says which, and how much of the other you are leaving unused — because where data binds another distro fixes nothing, and where power binds another processor fixes nothing.

01

A key, and a tailnet

Your public key appended to the root account, and the current stable arm64 Tailscale alongside it. No auth key is baked in — one in a file a web page hands you is one in cleartext — so the unit arrives installed and signed out. Stock firmware has no TUN device and ships no kernel modules at all, so Tailscale runs in userspace networking: inbound still works, measured at ~195 Mbps against a 920 Mbps wired baseline. Enough for NDI|HX and SRT, not for full-bandwidth NDI.

02

Signed in from the decoder's own page

Choosing Tailscale also adds a Tailscale panel to the System page of the PLAY's own web interface, so the unit joins a tailnet from a browser rather than over SSH. Reading status is open; changing anything needs a live login to that interface, because an open Tailscale API would let anyone on the LAN join the box to a tailnet of their own.

03

NDI KVM

A keyboard and mouse on the PLAY's USB port drive the machine it is displaying, forwarded to the NDI source as metadata. The agent opens its own receiver at metadata-only bandwidth, so it costs nothing on the wire and coexists with the decoder's own. It uses the free NDI SDK and loads the device's existing library at run time, so no NDI code is redistributed.

04

A USB stick as a source

Beta

USB joins the source dropdown, and a stick plays video, stills and PDFs straight to HDMI — hardware-decoded, in order or shuffled, looping until you pick something else. The media stack was already on the box and unused; what was missing is that nothing mounts a stick and USB is not on the list of names the web UI accepts.

05

A camera in, NDI out

Beta

The decoder run backwards: a USB camera on the same port, out as NDI, NDI|HX, SRT or HDMI, any combination from one capture, with its settings in a tab in the decoder's own interface. The chip's hardware encoder is fitted and switched on, and the vendor's software never touches it — a decoder has nothing to encode.

06

Built here, not on a server

No upload

tar, gzip and SHA-256 are browser APIs now, so the whole archive is assembled in the tab: no upload, no account, and nothing you type leaves the page. The only server-side code in the project is a proxy that fetches the Tailscale release, because their download host serves no CORS header — and you can hand the tarball over yourself instead, to pin a version or build offline.

01

The whole device, put back

Bootloader, u-boot, trust, kernel, device tree, rootfs and the partition table, written from a factory image you supply. This is the brick-recovery path: it does not need the unit to boot, to hold an address, or to serve its web page.

02

A package that installs itself

Optionally, the .fw the Patcher built goes into the image on the way through, and a one-shot service hands it to the decoder's own updater on first boot — so the unit arrives patched. It marks itself done before installing rather than after, so a package that kills the box cannot reinstall itself on every boot.

03

It costs the filesystem nothing

The rootfs partition is 3.5 GB and the image inside it is 2.2 GB, so there is over a gigabyte at the end that nothing ever grows into. The package is parked there as raw bytes. The three small files that call it back are added to a plain ext2 filesystem — no journal, no extents, no checksums — which is what makes writing them from JavaScript defensible rather than reckless.

04

Nothing is uploaded, and no key is involved

Your image never leaves the machine: it is read through the file picker, parsed in the tab and pushed straight down the USB cable. Even the loader that gets sent to the device first is extracted from your own file at run time. There is no vendor key anywhere in this, which is the only reason it can be a public page at all.

01

Build the rig, then focus it

Truss, scaff, bars and wind-up stands. Hang fixtures along a bar at a spacing or place them one at a time, then aim one at a point on the stage and it resolves the pan and tilt for you — checked against the fixture's real pan and tilt range, so a moving head that cannot get there says so rather than quietly pretending.

02

Two planes, and they disagree

The point of it

Horizontal is illuminance on a surface parallel to the deck — the floor wash. Vertical is a surface facing the audience at head height, which is what a face receives. Overhead light arrives nearly edge-on to that plane and contributes almost nothing to it, so flipping between the two inverts the ranking of your fixtures: on the default rig the backlight contributes exactly zero to the face plane and the front-of-house units more than double. That inversion is the most common mistake in a stage rig, and it is one toggle away.

03

Every number says where it came from

Provenance

Each fixture is badged measured, published or estimated. Measured is read from a manufacturer photometric file you imported. Published has its beam angle, field angle and centre-beam candela transcribed from a named datasheet, with only the roll-off between them modelled. Estimated is a generic archetype synthesised from lamp output and beam angle — and anything containing an estimate is named Generic, which a test enforces, so there is no such thing here as a real product with invented numbers.

04

It finds the problems, then writes them down

Uniformity, coverage against a design level, and contiguous hot and dark patches listed by area with their centres — so "there is a hole downstage left" becomes a number and a coordinate. Out comes a PDF with the levels, the problem areas, a full fixture schedule with focus and heights, and the structural loading per bar, plus CSV of the schedule and of the raw grid.

01

Convert between the two ecosystems

Shure ↔ Sennheiser

Reads Shure .shw and .cws, Sennheiser .wsm projects, WSM HTML coordination reports, WSM Frequencies/Bands CSV, WWB coordination report CSV, a bare frequency list, or any other CSV through a column-mapping dialog. Writes a WWB frequency list, WWB inventory CSV, WSM Frequencies/Bands CSV, generic CSV, or an experimental WWB7 .shw. Everything routes through one internal channel model, which is what makes any input re-exportable as any output.

02

An Ofcom licence is an input

Upload a PMSE licence schedule PDF and get a WWB frequency list, a reference sheet mapping each frequency to a suggested name and coordination group, and an experimental .shw. Validated against a real schedule — all 116 assignments, with their frequencies, sites, periods, fees and header metadata.

03

Coordination that knows what you own

Mode, not model

Pick the equipment profile, the band variant you actually own — a ULX-D G51 coordinates differently from an H50 — and the operating mode, because spacing is a property of the mode: Axient Digital wants 350 kHz standard and 125 kHz in High Density. The engine builds each radio's candidate grid and places carriers clear of third-order and optional fifth-order intermodulation products. Bands with gaps are respected, mixed rigs take the wider of any two spacings, each radio keeps its own tuning raster, and the result is deterministic — the same request always reproduces.

04

Every number says where it came from

Provenance

Each spacing figure is labelled from the manufacturer's documentation, calculated from published figures, or no source — assumed, verify before a show, with the URL it came from. Shure, Sennheiser, Lectrosonics and Wisycom are researched; the rest of the catalogue still carries placeholders and says so on screen rather than in a footnote.

.txt

WWB frequency list

Documented format

The licensed frequencies in Shure's own documented import format — megahertz, three decimals, one per line. Import it through Wireless Workbench's Import frequencies from file. This is the safe path, and for most jobs it's the only file you need.

.csv

Reference sheet

Documented format

Every frequency mapped to a suggested channel name and to its Ofcom coordination and fee group. An Ofcom licence carries no per-microphone names — it is a list of frequencies — so this is the sheet you label channels from, and the one you hand to whoever is patching.

.shw

WWB7 show file

Experimental

A native Wireless Workbench 7 show file with receivers built, channels named and frequencies already assigned. An in-page editor groups the frequencies into receivers of any channel count from one to eight — not fixed four-channel blocks — names every channel, and sets an IP per receiver.

01

Presenter view

Now and Next side by side, and a strip of every slide underneath — click any of them to jump straight there. Arrow keys, Page Up/Page Down and Space all advance, so a presentation clicker works without configuring anything, because a clicker is just a keyboard.

02

A separate output window

A second window showing only the current slide, which you drag to the projector and make fullscreen. Keys pressed while that window has focus still drive the show — so a stray click on the output, or a clicker aimed at it, does not strand you.

03

Blanking and the laser pointer

Press B or W to cut the output to solid black or white without losing your place, the way PowerPoint's presenter shortcuts do. Move the mouse over the Now preview with the pointer enabled and a glowing dot tracks it on the output.

04

The PDF's own structure

Links authored into the deck — a contents page, "back to agenda" — are clickable on the Now slide and jump to the right page. Top-level bookmarks become named sections. There is also a timed auto-advance that stops at the last slide rather than looping.

01

It ignores the fonts the theme only mentions

The point of it

Every Office theme carries a script-fallback table — thirty-odd CJK and Indic families to reach for if the deck ever contains Devanagari or Khmer — and it is there whether or not a single such character exists in the file. Search three real presentations for typeface= and you get 39, 36 and 9 distinct names. The true answers are 2, 4 and 6. A tool that counts the table tells you to install Mongolian Baiti for a slide that says Welcome in Calibri. The ones it dropped are listed at the bottom of the page, because the discrepancy is a fair question.

02

A face is not a family

Decks name faces, not families: Helvetica Neue Medium, Poppins Regular, Times Roman. Compared straight against the list of installed families, three of those four report missing when the font is sitting right there — and then you are offered a download of "Helvetica Neue Medium" from Google Fonts, which does not exist. Style suffixes are stripped to family, weight and slant first, and matched against full and PostScript names as well as families. Arial Black is left alone, because it is its own family and not a 900-weight of Arial.

03

It checks what is actually installed

Where the browser has the Local Font Access API it asks the system directly. Everywhere else it measures the width of a test string rendered in the candidate font against each of the three generic fallbacks — a difference means the font resolved to something real. Checked against CoreText's own list on macOS across nine fonts, the measurement method agreed on all nine.

04

Embedded fonts are reported, not demanded

A deck can carry its fonts inside it, in which case there is nothing to install. What is stored is not a TTF but EOT, and what happens next depends on who wrote the file: PowerPoint compresses the glyph data with MicroType Express and it cannot be unpacked, while Canva and LibreOffice do not, and those come back out as valid installable files. Either way the font travels with the .pptx, and the page says which case you are in.

05

A bundle that installs itself

The sidecar .zip carries the fonts, a manifest saying where each came from and under what licence, and a small installer for macOS, Windows and Linux that writes to your own account with no administrator password. It also heads off the two things that break this: on macOS anything extracted from a downloaded zip inherits a quarantine flag and Gatekeeper blocks the installer, and on Windows the same provenance makes PowerShell refuse the .ps1 — hence the .cmd wrapper. Both have a no-script route as well.

01

The real files, not the web versions

The point of it

The Google Fonts CSS API serves woff2 cut down by unicode-range — one file for Latin, another for Cyrillic — and a browser cannot ask it for anything else. A subsetted font installs without complaint and then renders blanks for the first character outside its subset. So the files come from the google/fonts repository itself, complete, with jsDelivr as a mirror for when GitHub rate-limits a bulk pull, and the CSS API is used for one thing only: the preview line on each card, where a small subsetted file is exactly right.

02

Two catalogues, one search

Every Google Fonts family, plus the hundred-odd Fontsource carries that Google does not — Adwaita, Aileron, Chunk Five. The Fontsource ones are kept only where the family has a single subset, because its files are subsetted too and a single-subset family loses nothing to it. Search by name or designer; filter by category, source, licence, script, variable axes and italics; sort by popularity, name or date added.

03

A zip that fits the whole catalogue

Two thousand families is about 2.2 GB and 4,400 files, which no browser tab can hold in memory as one archive. On Chrome and Edge the zip is streamed straight to disk as it is built, so the whole catalogue costs nothing; elsewhere it is built in memory and split into parts. Inside: one folder per family with its licence text, a manifest naming the source and licence of every file, and installer scripts for macOS, Windows and Linux that write to your own account.

04

Lists, and honest answers for the names it cannot find

A CSV, an XML file or a plain list of names resolves against the catalogue, tolerating case, punctuation and a trailing style word, so Poppins-Bold finds Poppins. A name that is not open source gets a stand-in where one exists — Carlito for Calibri, Arimo for Arial, Tinos for Times New Roman, the same widths so nothing reflows — and a plain “similar, widths differ” where it does not. Export the checkout back out as a list to hand to another machine.

05

Provisioning: one folder, every machine

The desktop app runs at login in the tray. Point it at a watched folder, a mounted SMB, NFS or WebDAV share, or a WebDAV URL directly, and on every pass it installs the font files it finds there and fetches whatever the lists there name. Lists are remembered by content hash and processed again only when they change; a file already in the font folder is never touched; nothing is ever removed. Headless --sync and --install exist for scripts and login hooks.

01

It knows which phone it is talking to

The point

Plug it in and it reads the codename, model, Android version, security patch level, bootloader version, slot layout and lock state — over ADB if the phone is booted, over fastboot if it is in the bootloader. If the codename does not match the procedure on screen it stops there. Flashing one device’s build onto another is the single most reliable way to end up with a paperweight.

02

The procedure is for your phone, not for phones

A Pixel 4a is told about its dtbo partition and its stock-Android-13 requirement, because it has both. A Xiaomi is told that Mi Unlock, a Mi account and a seven-day wait stand in front of everything else on the page. A Samsung is told this tool cannot flash it at all, because Odin is not fastboot and no browser speaks it.

03

It checks the files before it flashes them

LineageOS publishes a machine-readable manifest for every build, so a file you drop in is hashed in the page and checked against the SHA-256 for that exact build. A file that does not match is refused rather than flashed — which is the entire reason for hashing it.

04

It shows its working

Every automated step prints the adb and fastboot commands it stands in for, whether or not you let it run them. That is what makes the page useful without WebUSB, and it is how you check what it is about to do before you allow it.