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Highly compatible.
Bring your own DMX interface: USB, Art-Net, sACN, or ESP-Net.
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Vastly powerful.
Control up to 8192 DMX channels (16 full universes). NEW
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Surprisingly simple.
Easy to learn, quick to set up. Engineered exclusively for Mac.
Highly compatible.
Bring your own DMX interface.
Save the cost of expensive proprietary DMX hardware: Lightkey works with a wide range of USB interfaces plus any Art-Net, sACN, or ESP-Net-compatible device, thanks to the Open Lighting Architecture. Whatever DMX interface you have, there’s a good chance that Lightkey supports it—simply download Lightkey for free, plug in your interface, and give it a try.
Smart lights.
Expanded capabilities.
Add smart lights to your projects and control them just like your DMX lights. Lightkey controls bulbs, LED strips, smart plugs and other types of lights by Philips Hue.
improved
Hardware control.
Enhance your experience.
Do you prefer the physical controls on a lighting console? Then you can have the best of both worlds. Lightkey integrates seamlessly with any standard MIDI controller and DMX console (through DMX-In). You can map each hardware control to whatever feature you like and build your own custom-tailored show control desk to trigger cues, presets and sequences, adjust fixture properties, tap the beat, and whatever else you need.
Designed for creativity.
Take your light show to a new level.
Designed for the needs of creative lighting designers, Lightkey breaks free from the old thinking about DMX values and channels. Thru advanced fixture profiles it understands all your fixtures’ properties—like Color, Gobo, Shutter, Prism, Zoom—, and provides specially-designed, easy-to-use controls for each of them. The current state of your fixtures is always visible in the live preview. Simply concentrate on the perfect light show and let Lightkey translate it to the proper DMX values.
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Virtual light beams
Virtual light beams show your lights’ real-world positions and also reflect intensity, color, focus, zoom, iris, frost, and shutter/strobe states.
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Built-in stage editor
The built-in graphical editor lets you recreate the stage or dance floor on the screen. Apart from your fixtures you can add shapes, trusses, and custom images.
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Copy & paste
Easily copy and paste properties and effects between fixtures – even fixtures of different types. Of course, you can undo as well.
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At a glance
Little “bubbles” in the Preview show you at a glance which fixture properties are overridden or defined by a preset, sequence, or cue.
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On-the-fly changes
Quickly change any fixture property on the fly—perfect for nightclubs and parties where you don’t have a song run sheet in advance.
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Intelligent Design view
The Design view automatically adapts itself according to your fixtures and their properties so you only see the controls you really need.
Real-world pan/tilt locations
Lightkey knows your moving light’s pan/tilt range, home position, and rotation direction. With this information it calculates the precise beam position on the stage or dance floor, so the preview always shows the fixture’s real-world position.
Effects.
Infinite possibilities.
Lightkey’s powerful effects engine makes it easy and fun to create amazing dynamic looks. Choose from 70+ effect templates or create your own pattern, curve, or movement effects. Effects can be applied to almost any fixture property and stored in presets and cues while staying editable all the time. Apply effects to multi-beam LED strips and matrixes. Synchronize effects to music. Overlay multiple effects for countless possibilities.
Beat control.
Stay in the rhythm.
Effortlessly sync your light show to music. Lightkey connects to your DAW, DJ app, or audio analysis software through MIDI Clock or Ableton Link. Or simply tap the beat and Lightkey will continue at the same tempo. You can adjust the speed of individual cues at any time with a Beat Multiplier.
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Tap the beat
Tap the beat with the mouse, keyboard, or a MIDI controller, and Lightkey will pick up the tempo.
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MIDI Clock
Receive a MIDI Beat Clock signal sent by a DJ software, mixer, or audio analysis tool.
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Ableton Link
Ableton Link syncs beat information between apps on the same computer or local network.
Always in sync.
Run your lighting from Ableton Live.
The unique Live Triggers feature makes it quick and intuitive to trigger lighting cues directly from Ableton Live: Simply drag cues you created in Lightkey to the Ableton Live timeline. If you’re a live performer, you can create a light show that’s perfectly in sync with the music without any manual operation during the show.
Command central.
Don’t waste your time shuffling windows and panels around. Everything you need is cleanly arranged in a single window, providing you with exactly the controls you need at any time. The elegant, white-on-dark UI has been specially designed for use in low-light environments—it even adapts itself to the light colors.
This 2D view of your lighting rig shows the current state of the fixtures with virtual light beams
Create and organize presets and sequences
Build a custom-tailored control panel with buttons and faders to control your lights during a show
Shows keyboard shortcuts and gestures for the current context
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Full-screen mode
The single-window user interface has been specially designed for full-screen mode. -
Touch screen friendly
All controls have large clickable areas and work great with touch screens.
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Multi-touch gestures
Pinch, swipe, scroll, force click: With a Multi-Touch trackpad you can change fixture properties in a natural way. (And it’s fun too.)
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Extensive keyboard shortcuts
A clever, well-structured, and extensible system of keyboard shortcuts lets you control virtually every application feature.
Lightkey User Guide.
Take an in-depth look.
Setup.
Surprisingly simple.
An interactive assistant guides you through the entire setup process: Configure DMX output, patch your fixtures, create a visual representation of the stage. And if you ever need a fixture profile that is not in the built-in library, simply send us the DMX specs and we’ll create it for you within a few days.
Fixtures.
State of the art.
Lightkey handles even the most sophisticated fixtures with ease. Its smart fixture profiles support multiple modes, 16-bit output, conditional properties, RGB/CMY color mixing, up to three color and gobo wheels, custom beam layouts, and much more. Lightkey comes with a massive library of 5000+ high-quality fixture profiles for all popular manufacturers and can import thousands of freely available profiles in the formats SSL2, FXT, and PFF.
High technology.
Made for your Mac.
Lightkey was engineered from the ground up as a native Mac app. It perfectly matches your Mac’s look and feel and comes with all the familiar features like Dark Mode, full screen view, autosaving, Shortcuts integration, copy and paste, unlimited undo/redo, and automatic updates. Under the hood, Lightkey takes full advantage of your Mac’s capabilities including 64-bit processing on Apple and Intel chips, multicore computing thru Grand Central Dispatch, pristine Retina graphics and fluid animations using Apple’s Core Animation and Metal 2 technologies.
powered by Metal 2
Editions & pricing.
What’s your Lightkey edition?
- All editions come with the full feature set, even the free edition.
- You can always upgrade if you need more channels later.
Output channels |
24 |
256 |
512 |
1024 |
81921 |
Price in US Dollars, taxes may apply |
Free |
$79 per year |
$119 per year |
$199 per year |
$379 per year |
USB output |
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Art-Net output |
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sACN output |
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ESP-Net output |
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Smart lights2 optional |
5 lights |
100 lights + $50 |
100 lights + $50 |
100 lights + $50 |
100 lights + $50 |
DMX input |
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MIDI input |
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OSC input |
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| Buy | Buy | Buy | Buy |
2 Lightkey 4 and macOS 12 or later are required to control smart lights.
Check it out.
Today. For free.
What you need
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Mac computer
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DMX interface
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Your lights
Any DMX-enabled fixtures
Lightkey is powered by the Open Lighting Architecture, an open-source framework by the Open Lighting Project. Download the source code here or grab the latest version on GitHub.