QLab OSC Mimic

Description

The QLab OSC Mimic is a community-created plugin for Linux Show Player (LiSP).

This plugin causes LiSP to respond to some of the same OSC messages that allow remote control of QLab.

This idea is that this should allow the use of mobile-device apps designed for the purpose of remote controlling QLab to also control LiSP.

Remote Apps

The following apps are known about and work with the QLab OSC Mimic plugin (to some limited degree):

QLab Remote

(iOS / iPadOS)

The official iOS/iPadOS app from Figure53, the people who created QLab.

The app is available for free from the iOS/iPadOS App Store, however this is restricted to Read-Only mode. To enable remote control, one must pay an in-app purchase. At the time of writing, this is roughly USD$39.99.

Audio Toolbox

(iPadOS)

A free (but not Open Source) third party app with many useful features, QLab control being one of them.

Note

At present this app does not support Carts properly, displaying cues as a list.

Q Surface

(iOS / iPadOS)

A free (but not Open Source) third party app that can be used to adjust the control points of video surfaces used by QLab.

Note

As LiSP doesn't currently output the visual component of video files it plays, there's no real point to using this with LiSP.

qControl

(iOS / Android)

A free (but not Open Source) app with a limited interface. Could be useful as a "GO" button for calling cues from a cue stack.

The reliability of this app is questionable: even when running with an actual copy of QLab it only sometimes works - other times it just fails to connect.

Note

This app does not support Carts.

Note

It is not possible for this app to discover LiSP shows available: the app looks for workspaces that are available for control with OSC-over-UDP only. (But then uses OSC-over-TCP to control them.)

Warning

This app does not correctly disconnect itself from running workspaces, nor does it handle disconnect notifications from QLab or LiSP.

Note

This app is not Open Source, however the underlying toolkit (a work in progress port to .NET of the official ObjC toolkit) is, and can be found at https://github.com/jwetzell/QControlKit.

Note

This app is confused:

First, it only "discovers" workspaces advertised as controllable via UDP, but then uses TCP when trying to interact with them.

Second, it requires all OSC messages it receives to be "double END SLIP" encoded, but doesn't send OSC messages encoded this way.

Note

I have only tested on iPadOS.

Incompatible apps

Q GO

(iOS / iPadOS)

A free (but not Open Source) app designed to be used with QLab versions 2 and 3. As such it uses MIDI to control QLab, not OSC. (And communication is one-way.)

MiniStatus

(iOS / iPadOS)

A third-party app (requiring an in-app purchase if you wish to use it for more than three minutes at a time) that displays the status of various network attached devices and QLab workspaces.

Warning

Emits malformed OSC.

Specifically: it omits the OSC Type Tag. According to the OSC v1.0 spec (written 2002), this is indicative of an "older" implementation.

According to the App Store, MiniStatus was first released 4th August 2020. This means that it is using an OSC implementation that is considered "old" by a specification that was itself 18 years old when the app was released.

Needless to say, our OSC library is much newer, and thus rejects the non-standard OSC messages emitted by MiniStatus.

Installation

To install and use this plugin for LiSP, there are a couple of steps.

Dependencies

Linux Show Player

Specifically, there are some modifications made to LiSP's code-base that support the plugin. For ease of acquisition, clone https://github.com/s0600204/linux-show-player.git (or add it as a remote to a preexisting clone) and recall the "show" branch. You will need to run LiSP from this branch.

liblo

The minimum required version of liblo to run this plugin is 0.31.

Unfortunately, only a handful of Linux distributions (at the time of writing) offer this version (or better). To overcome this, you will need to acquire the source, then compile and install it manually (you may need to remove the package provided by your distribution's package repositories).

pyliblo

Regrettably, the maintainer(s) of this dependency have not updated their project since 2015. And we will need a more recent version than that made public by the project maintainers, let alone provided by the PyPI or any Linux distribution.

From the provided link (pyliblo), clone the master branch of the source code repository, then merge both currently outstanding Pull Requests (#17 & #22) as we need the changes contained within both. Follow the instructions of the project's README to build and install. Depending on your chosen flavour of Linux, you may need to remove your distribution's package first.

python-zeroconf

Installable from PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/zeroconf/, or from GitHub: https://github.com/jstasiak/python-zeroconf. Your distribution might also have a suitable package in its repositories.

Installation

Once ready, navigate to $XDG_DATA_HOME/LinuxShowPlayer/$LiSP_Version/plugins/ (on most Linux systems $XDG_DATA_HOME is ~/.local/share), and create a subfolder named qlab_mimic.

Place the files comprising this plugin into this new folder.

When you next start Linux Show Player, the program should load the plugin automatically.