The DMXexpress guide

Getting Started

What DMXexpress is

DMXexpress is a native lighting controller with a built-in 3D visualizer. You patch fixtures, build looks, run effects, record cues, and stream the result to the real world over Art-Net. Everything happens in one window, and everything you build is visible on the virtual stage as you build it.

The one big idea

You build a look in the Programmer, then store it into something reusable — a Palette, a Preset, a Phaser, or a Cue. Playback runs underneath the Programmer, so whatever you are editing always wins until you clear it.

If you have read grandMA3 tutorials

DMXexpress is modelled on grandMA3 with friendlier names. Here is the translation:

Getting Started

Install and run

Grab a prebuilt release for Windows, macOS, or Linux from the download page — no toolchain, installer, or companion files needed. An Art-Net node is only required for live output; the visualizer works with nothing else on the network.

Building from source instead

You need a current Rust toolchain and a GPU supported by wgpu.

# run in development
cargo run

# optimized build
cargo build --release
./target/release/dmxpress

# run the tests
cargo test

First launch

1. Launched outside a show directory, DMXexpress creates a per-user data folder and seeds it with the sample rigs and stage setups.
2. Open Patch and add fixtures — search the built-in library, pick a built-in profile, or let a ShowBuddy patch load on macOS.
3. Set Universe in the toolbar to your base universe. Slots 1–512 go there, slots 513–1024 to the next universe.
4. Press ArtPoll to discover Art-Net devices, then pick a node in the Art-Net panel.
5. Leave the Log window open while you learn — it narrates everything you do.

Getting Started

The screen at a glance

One window, four fixed regions, and a set of floating windows you toggle from the top toolbar. Every panel has its own small A- / A+ zoom stepper in its corner, so you can size each area independently.

Toolbar chips

Art-Net, Oscillator, Transition, Chases, Groups, Orders, Scenes, Palettes, Gobos, Phasers, Beat, Audio, Stacks, Decks, Cmd, Views, Log, Patch, Configs, DMX, and Settings. Each one shows or hides its window. Art-Net docks to the top, Decks and Cmd dock to the bottom; the rest float.

The Inspector's five tabs

The right-hand panel is not one page but five: Presets, Selection, Stage, Build, and Patch. Press Alt-1 to Alt-5 to jump between them and Alt-I to fold the panel away. A context line under the tab strip always says what is selected. It has a chapter of its own.

Getting Started

The Programmer, and why Clear matters

This is the single concept that trips up every newcomer, so it gets its own page.

What the Programmer is

• It holds every channel you have touched since the last Clear.
• It is an overlay that sits on top of all playback. While a channel is in the Programmer, you control it, not the cues.
• Store copies the Programmer into a palette or cue. It does not clear it.
• Only active channels get stored, which is what makes cue tracking work.

How to release it

1. Press Clear in the Palettes window, or Clear prog in the Stacks window.
2. Or type clear (or c) in the command line.
3. Watch the n programmer ch active readout drop to zero.

Active-channel readouts

Both the Palettes window and the Stacks window show a live count of active Programmer channels. Use it as your safety light: a non-zero count means playback is being overridden somewhere.

Getting Started

Your first show

A complete run-through that produces a three-cue show. Assumes a few moving heads are patched. Do this once and the rest of the guide will make sense.

A. Save a selection

1. Select all your movers in the Fixtures panel or on the stage.
2. Open Groups, type Movers, press Store.

B. Build palettes

1. With Movers selected, dial full blue in Channel control.
2. Open Palettes, pick the Color tab, type Blue, press Store Color.
3. Dial red, store it as Red.
4. Point the movers at the crowd with Pan and Tilt, switch to the Position tab, store it as Audience.
5. Point them center stage and store Center.

C. Record three cues

1. Open Stacks, press New, name the stack Main.
2. Recall the Movers group, click Blue, click Center, set Dimmer to full.
3. Set Fade to 3 seconds and press Store cue. That is cue 1.
4. Click Red, click Audience, press Store cue. That is cue 2.
5. Open Phasers, add a PAN component, press Apply, return to Stacks and press Store cue. That is cue 3.

D. Play it

1. Press Clear prog. This step is not optional.
2. Open Decks, push the Main fader up.
3. Press Go to step through cues 1, 2, and 3, each fading over its time.
4. Pull GM down to dim the whole rig.

Rig & Stage · Patch

Patch

Adds fixtures from the built-in fixture library or the hand-written DMXexpress profiles, on top of (or instead of) a ShowBuddy patch. This is where your rig is defined in DMX terms.

How to patch a fixture

1. Open Patch from the toolbar.
2. Search the Fixture library by name and maker — 2,200+ models — or pick one of the Built-in profiles from the dropdown. The line underneath reports the channel count and pan/tilt range of whatever is selected.
3. Type a Name, set the Address (1–1024) and a Count (1–32).
4. Press Add. Addresses advance automatically and multiples get numbered suffixes.

Managing what is in the rig

Rig & Stage · Fixture library

The fixture library

DMXexpress ships with a built-in library of over 2,200 fixture models — 7,400+ patchable modes from 209 manufacturers — so most rigs patch without writing a single profile.

Where it comes from

The library is compiled from three open sources, merged so the best data wins:

Every mode is flattened into its own entry with the channel list already in address order, and every channel's role is resolved from the source's own capability data rather than guessed from its name.

How to patch from it

1. Open Patch from the toolbar.
2. Type into Search under Fixture library — try chauvet spot — and optionally narrow the maker dropdown.
3. Click a result. Each row is one channel mode of one model, with its details in the subtitle.
4. Set Name, Address, and Count, then press Add, exactly as with a built-in profile.

When a fixture is missing

Hand-written profiles cover anything the converters can't reach — the repository's FIXTURES.md documents the profile format, the channel helpers, and how to rebuild the library from the upstream sources with tools/build_library.py.

Rig & Stage · Fixtures panel

Fixtures panel

The left rail. One tile per patched fixture, filled with that fixture's live output color, so the panel doubles as an at-a-glance rig monitor.

Reading a tile

• Top-left text is the fixture name, truncated to fit.
• Bottom-left text is its DMX start address.
• The fill is the fixture's current output color; text flips to black on bright fills.
• A thick blue outline means selected.
• Hovering shows the full name, the DMX range, and the channel count.

Selection modifiers

Six ways to draw a tile

The dropdown in the panel header changes the material the tiles are made of. Every look shows the same three things — the live colour, the name, the address — and answers the same selection outline; pick whichever one you can read fastest across a dark room.

A tile's brightness tracks the fixture's real output, corrected so a dim lamp looks as dim as it actually is. The depth is painted with gradient meshes rather than textures, so a rig of two hundred tiles costs no more to draw than a flat grid.

Rig & Stage · 3D stage view

3D stage view

The upper half of the center panel. It is both your pre-visualization tool and your programming feedback loop: select fixtures on stage, drag them into position, and watch volumetric beams respond live.

Camera

Switch modes with the Orbit / Fly toggle on the Inspector's Stage tab, which also holds the quick-view pads, the saved cameras, and every switch for what the stage draws.

Selecting on stage

• Click a light to select it; click empty space to clear.
• Shift-click to toggle a light in or out of the selection.
• Cmd-click to grab every fixture of that type.
• Shift-drag across empty space for a marquee selection.

Moving things

1. Drag a light to slide it across the floor plane.
2. Hold Cmd while dragging to change its height instead.
3. Drag a light near the blue ring of a tower or truss slot to snap it on; drag it away to detach.
4. Grab a gizmo arrow to move the whole selection along one axis, or a gizmo ring to rotate it around the selection centroid.
5. Drag the stage box edge arrows to resize the stage itself.

Keyboard (with the stage hovered)

A card in the stage corner lists these as you work. Turn it off with the Help switch on the Inspector's Stage tab.

Rig & Stage · Trusses & towers

Trusses and towers

Real mounting structures for the 3D stage: floor-stand towers, F34-style straight box-truss runs, and curved radius truss — all with snap-on light slots, so the virtual rig hangs the way the real one will.

The three structures

Five more shapes are built out of those three in one press — goalpost, box, ring, tower pair, and arch — and stay grouped afterwards, so you move and turn the whole thing as one object. See the Build tab.

How to rig one

1. Open the Inspector's Build tab (Alt-4) and click one of the eight element pads. Keys 1 to 8 do the same while the pointer is over the tab.
2. Size it in the parameter card underneath — or right-click the pad for the standard lengths, radii, arcs, and heights.
3. Drag lights near the blue rings to snap them onto slots; drag them away to detach. To hang a whole selection at once, use Hang on on the Selection tab.
4. Click the structure with no lights selected and the Selection tab becomes its editor.
5. Edit X, Z, and Height numerically. Straight truss gets Length and Heading; radius truss gets Radius, Arc, and Start angle.
6. Pitch tilts the whole run out of the horizontal plane, and Roll sets which way a pitched truss faces.
7. Delete one from the Build tab's outliner, or press Backspace with the pointer over that list. It asks first and tells you how many lights it will unhang.

Rig & Stage · Settings

Settings

A small window covering the physical stage dimensions and how the visualizer renders. Every change is written to settings.json immediately.

The rest of the window

• Network… opens the Network screen — protocol, interface, node discovery, the checklist, and test patterns.
• Reset layout puts every light back to its default position, after a confirmation.
• The app version is printed at the bottom. Quote it in a bug report.

Stage width, depth, height, body size, and beam opacity are also editable on the Inspector's Stage tab, where you can see the result without leaving the panel. They are the same five settings, and they go into the undo history.

Rig & Stage · Configs

Configs and setups

Two different scopes of save. A configuration is the whole show. A setup is just the physical arrangement.

What a configuration contains

Stage settings, the 3D layout (placements, duplicates, towers, truss), patched fixtures, whether the ShowBuddy patch is included, excluded fixtures, groups, palettes, phasers, presets and preset folders, stacks, views, the universe, the grand master, and the cue fade time. Files land in configs/ as readable JSON.

What it deliberately leaves out is your workspace: which Inspector tab is open, how wide the panel is, which sections are folded, and what the stage draws. Those belong to the machine rather than the show, and live in inspector.json instead — so loading somebody else's configuration never rearranges your desk.

How to save and load a show

1. Open Configs from the toolbar.
2. Type a configuration name and press Save.
3. Press Load on any row to swap the entire show over.
4. Press the trash button and confirm to delete one.

Starting fresh

1. Press New show.
2. Tick Remove ShowBuddy lights and presets to keep only DMXexpress fixtures.
3. Tick Reset light positions to defaults if you want a clean stage.
4. Press Start fresh. Stage settings and DMXexpress-patched fixtures are kept.

Inspector · The five tabs

The Inspector

The right-hand panel, and the part of the app you touch most. It is five tabs — Presets, Selection, Stage, Build, Patch — sharing one strip, one context line, and one scroll area. Store looks, move lights, aim the camera, rig truss, patch fixtures: all of it without opening a window.

Getting around

The hotkeys only fire when no text field has the keyboard, so typing a preset name never jumps you somewhere else mid-word.

Badges on the tabs

Each tab carries a small count in its corner, so you can read the state of the show without switching:

The context line

Under the tab strip a single row always says what is picked, on every tab. It carries the live output colour of the first selected light as a swatch, a title, and a detail line: 6 lights · SlimPAR ×6 · 4 hung for a selection, DMX 17–25 · 9 ch for one light, F34 truss 2 · 4 / 24 slots · 6.0 m for a truss, 8.0 × 6.0 m · 0.3 m high for the stage box. With nothing selected it tells you what to do next.

• Click the row to jump to Selection — or to Patch when nothing is patched yet.
• Press the × to drop the selection.
• Right-click for Select every light, Select same type, and Clear selection.
• Hover the colour swatch for the first light's live RGB values and its output level.
• FROZEN and BLACKOUT pills appear on the right when either is in force.

Inspector · Presets tab

Presets tab

Store what the Programmer is holding as a look, then get it back with one press. A preset carries a stable id, so every reference to it — a board pad, a deck key, an audio trigger, the chase source — survives a rename, a reorder, or a delete.

Storing a look

1. Build something in the Programmer: a group, some palettes, a dimmer, a running phaser.
2. Type a name into the store card and press Store look. The button is gated while the Programmer is empty, and says so.
3. Pick a folder in the store card first and the look is filed straight into it.
4. Recall a preset, change it, then press Update with current look to overwrite the lit one.

Pads read their own colour

Every pad is coloured from the values inside it — the mixed emitter colour for a colour look, amber for a dimmer-only one, deep blue for a position, plain raised grey for anything else — unless you pick a colour by hand. Badges mark the presets carrying oscillators, phasers, or a colour cycle. The same colour reaches the Presets board and the Stream Deck, so a look is the same shade everywhere you meet it.

The recall row

A preset given a recall time of its own wins over the row, and shift-clicking any pad always cuts. Recall onto selection applies only the channels belonging to the lights you have selected, which is how you drop one look onto half a rig.

Organising the pool

• Search the pool, switch between Grid pads and List rows, and set the pad size to small, medium, or large.
• Sort Manual, Alpha, or Newest.
• Drag pads onto a folder to file them, or onto each other to reorder.
• Pin the handful you reach for constantly — they get their own strip above the pool.
• A Recent strip keeps the last few you recalled.
• Right-click a pad for Duplicate, Move to, Set as chase source, To board, Edit pad, and Delete.

The Presets board

The board button opens a 4 × 9 page of pads laid out exactly like the Stream Deck's Presets page — the same slots, the same reserved corners for select-all, Clear, and Tap. What you arrange here is what is under your fingers on the device, and a show with no deck plugged in gets the same board on screen.

1. Turn Arrange on.
2. Click a pad to point it at a preset, or at a ShowBuddy bank preset.
3. Drag pads to swap them; right-click to clear one.
4. Give each pad its own colour, four-letter label, and artwork.
5. Press Fill to lay a whole folder out in one go.

Pads hold preset ids, so renaming or reordering the pool never re-points a pad at the wrong look. A pad whose preset has gone shows a muted ? and says so when you press it.

ShowBuddy banks

If your ShowBuddy show carries preset banks they appear in their own section, one bank open at a time. Clicking a preset inside applies it to the whole rig; you can also Import as native preset, or import a whole bank into a folder, and edit it from then on like anything else you stored. The section is hidden while the ShowBuddy patch is switched off in Patch.

The output row

Underneath, one line always names the preset currently lit, or reads No preset active.

Inspector · Selection tab

Selection tab

Everything that moves, turns, lines up, aims, or hangs whatever is picked on the stage. A summary card, a Select bar, the transform grid and nudge pad, then a five-page tool strip. Pick a tower or a truss instead of lights and the tab shows that element's editor on its own.

The summary card

The top card counts what is selected and breaks it down — how many moving heads, how many are hung on the rig, how much space the selection covers as width × height × depth. With a single light picked it names it and gives its DMX range.

Select

An always-visible bar of verbs that build a selection without going near the stage: every light, every light of the same type as the last one picked, every copy of it, every mover, every par, every bar, everything not selected, everything not hung on anything, everything hung on the picked element, or the element a light hangs from. Your stored groups sit here too. Shift-clicking any of them adds to the selection instead of replacing it.

The transform grid

X, Y (height) and Z in metres, then Spin for a moving head's base, or Yaw, Pitch, and Roll for a fixed body, plus Size and a housing Opacity slider for the visualizer. Where the selected lights disagree, the row reads mixed rather than lying about a value; typing into it sets them all. Each row has its own reset.

Editing X, Y, or Z detaches a light from the tower or truss it hangs on. Rotating does not. Re-seat puts a detached light back onto its nearest free slot.

Nudge

A pad of six arrows that shift the selection by a fixed step. Shift multiplies the step by ten, Alt divides it by ten, and the arrow keys over the stage do the same thing. Switch the axes to camera-relative and "left" means left from where you are sitting rather than stage left — much easier once the camera is off-axis.

The five tool pages

Copies

Duplicate makes copies of the selected lights, with a step across and upstage per copy. Copies share the fixture's DMX address, so they cost nothing on the wire — they are extra bodies on stage, useful for a row of pars driven from one patch entry. Remove copy deletes them; the last copy of each fixture always stays.

Inspector · Stage tab

Stage tab

How you look at the rig. Camera mode, quick views, saved camera bookmarks, what the stage draws, and the size of the stage box. Nothing here is undoable, because none of it is show data — the camera has its own escape hatch instead.

Camera

• Switch between Orbit and Fly. Orbit: right-drag orbits, middle-drag pans, the wheel zooms. Fly: WASD moves, Space goes up, Shift down, the arrow keys look around.
• Seven quick-view pads jump to a stored angle: Iso, Front, Back, Left, Right, Top, and a front-of-house seat. Shift-click one to keep your current zoom instead of re-framing.
• Frame fits the selection in view (F over the stage), Fit rig fits the whole rig and the stage box (Home).
• Orbit and tilt buttons step the camera 15° round and 10° up or down; zoom buttons scale the distance.
• Camera → previous puts you back where you were before the last jump.
• Open Stage controls for the exact numbers: yaw, pitch, distance, field of view, and the target X, Y, Z the camera is aimed at.

Saved cameras

1. Frame a view you like.
2. Type a name and press Save. Leave the name blank and it is numbered for you.
3. Give the bookmark a digit from 1 to 9, then press that digit over the stage to fly back to it.
4. Tint a row so it stands out, reorder with the up and down buttons, rename in place with F2, or Update to current camera to re-point it.

Tour walks the saved cameras one after another on a timer you set — eight seconds each by default — which is the easy way to show a rig off, or to check a look from every seat in the house. You need at least two saved cameras.

Show

A block of switches for what the stage draws. Turn beams off to read positions, turn labels on to find a light by name, turn everything off but the plan view to lay a rig out on paper.

Three presets set the lot in one press: All turns everything on, Clean strips the scaffolding back to the lights, and Plan gives you a rig plan — names on every light, no beams, no pools.

Stage

The stage box's own width, depth, and height, plus body size and beam haze. These five are show settings and go into the undo history, unlike everything else on this tab. Select the stage box on stage and gold arrows appear on its edges so you can resize it by eye instead.

Options and Snapshot

• Animate camera moves glides over about a third of a second instead of cutting.
• Camera tracks the selection re-centres the orbit on whatever you pick.
• Quick views keep zoom flips the Shift behaviour round: the pads only turn the camera, and Shift re-frames.
• Restore the camera on launch opens the app looking where you left off.
• Snapshot writes a PNG of the stage view into the screenshots folder.

Inspector · Build tab

Build tab

The rig itself: what holds the lights up. Eight pads build the structures, a parameter card sizes whatever you picked, an outliner lists everything you have built, and Setups save a whole named arrangement to reuse on the next show.

The eight element pads

1. Click a pad to set it up — the parameter card underneath fills with that recipe's sizes.
2. Shift-click a pad to add it straight away with the last sizes you used.
3. Right-click a pad for the standard sizes: F34 run lengths, radii, arcs, spans, and crossbar heights are one tap each.
4. Keys 1 to 8 add while the pointer is over this tab.

Where a new element lands

The Place row decides that: Stagger takes the next free spot in a row, Upstage, Centre, and Downstage put it inside the stage box, Behind puts it clear of the box at the back for a backdrop rig, Camera drops it wherever you are looking, and Custom takes an exact spot on the floor. Heading turns it, in degrees clockwise from upstage.

The outliner

Every tower and truss in the rig, one row each, with a composite's parts folded under a single heading — a goalpost lists its left leg, its right leg, and its beam. Turn Lights on and each element's hung fixtures appear as rows beneath it.

• Click a row to pick that element on the stage; double-click to rename it.
• With the pointer over the list, Backspace deletes, F2 renames, and the arrow keys step through it.
• Right-click for Move / turn, Duplicate, Mirror across centre, Hide, Point camera here, Select its lights, Unhang lights, Ungroup, and Delete.
• A composite can be slid, turned, raised, and mirrored as one thing, legs and all.
• Deleting an element asks first, and tells you how many lights it is about to unhang. The lights stay exactly where they were hanging.

Setups

1. Build a rig you want to keep.
2. Type a name in the Setups section and press Save to store every light position, copy, tower, and truss under it.
3. Or press Rig only to save just the towers and trusses as a template, with no light positions in it.
4. Press Load to bring a whole arrangement back, Load rig only to take its structures and leave your lights where they are, or Load lights only for the reverse.
5. Add to current rig merges a setup's elements into what you already have.

Setups are files in setups/, so a rig you build once travels between shows — and between machines.

Reset

Inspector · Patch tab

Patch tab

The fast way in. One press patches a batch, places it, and selects it, so a rig goes up in one pass instead of a light at a time. The tab reads top to bottom: pick a model, check the preview, set count, address and name, choose where it lands, press Patch.

Picking a model

• Recents puts the last few models you patched one click away.
• Built-in lists the hand-written DMXexpress profiles.
• Library searches the whole fixture library by name and maker, with filter chips for Moving, Par, Bar, Strobe, and Other.

Whatever you pick, a preview card shows the mode, its channel count, the pan and tilt ranges, and what each channel does, with a coloured role badge per channel. Read it before you commit — it is the cheapest way to catch a 12-channel mode where you wanted the 16.

Addresses and names

1. Set a count: how many of this model you are adding.
2. Set the start address, or let it follow. Next free appends past the last patched light; first gap finds the first hole big enough for the whole batch.
3. The address plan lists what each copy would get before you press anything, and says so if the batch would run past slot 1024.
4. Tick skip taken to step over addresses already in use, and same universe to stop a fixture straddling the boundary at slot 512.
5. Name them once. They are numbered for you, continuing the series already in the rig — patch four more SlimPAR and you get 5, 6, 7, 8.

Where the batch lands

The Place row lays the new lights out as it patches them: Keep leaves them where the patch put them, Line X and Line Z run them across or up the stage, then Grid, Arc, Circle, and Floor. Choose Truss or Tower instead and they hang straight onto the rig — on an existing element, or on a new one the tab builds to fit the batch.

The rig summary

Underneath, every light in the rig grouped by fixture definition: how many of each, the address range they cover, and how full each universe is. Per row you can add one more of that type, select them all, or unpatch them. Unpatching is a two-step confirm that arms for four seconds, so a mis-click costs you nothing.

The ShowBuddy section switches the imported patch in and out of the rig without losing it, exactly as the Patch window does — the two share the same state, so they never disagree.

Programming · Channel control

Channel control

The lower half of the center panel. This is the Programmer. What it shows depends on how many fixtures are selected.

One fixture selected

You get one row per physical channel, labelled with its DMX address and channel name. Good for dialling in a single fixture or checking exactly what a profile exposes.

Several fixtures selected

Rows collapse into channel types, each labelled with a count. Dragging the Dimmer row moves the dimmer on every selected fixture at once, even across different fixture models.

What is in a row

Arming channels

1. Click a row label to arm it. Clicking a different row replaces the armed set.
2. Shift-click or Cmd-click to arm several rows at once.
3. The bottom row shows n ch armed with a small clear button.
4. Open Oscillator to animate whatever is armed.

Bottom row

Blackout sets every channel of every target fixture to 0. Full sets them to 255. Both act on the selection only.

Programming · Groups

Groups

A group is a saved fixture selection — no values. Build the ones you keep coming back to and everything downstream gets faster.

How to build and use groups

1. Select fixtures on stage or in the Fixtures panel.
2. Type a name and press Store. The button is disabled with an empty selection.
3. Click a tile to recall it, replacing the current selection.
4. Shift-click several tiles to combine groups into one selection. The click order is remembered as a chain, shown as #1, #2 on the tiles — that chain is what the Orders window turns into a route.
5. Right-click a tile for Recall, Add to selection, Update from selection, and Delete.

Effect phase mode

The right-click menu also offers Individual fixtures or One fixture. In One fixture mode the entire group takes a single phase slot in phaser spreads, so a cluster of pars behaves as one unit inside a chase instead of fanning internally. It also collapses to a single point in space, so spatial chases sweep past the whole cluster at once. Tiles show a 1 light marker when this mode is on.

Because a folded group has to move as one, the stage will not let you select part of it — clicking any member pulls in the rest.

Editing several groups at once

Shift-click a run of groups, then right-click any of them. Below the per-group controls you get a Chained groups section with All: individual fixtures and All: one light each, so a whole route can be folded or freed in one action.

Programming · Orders

Orders

An order is the path an effect travels. Without one, every spread fans out in fixture number order, which is rarely the shape you actually want on stage.

What an order is made of

An order is a list of steps. Each step holds one light, or several lights that share a phase and move together as a single super-fixture. A phaser hands out one phase slot per step, in order, so the steps decide both the sequence and what counts as one light.

How to build one from groups

1. In Groups, click the first group, then shift-click the rest in the order you want the effect to travel. Tiles number themselves as you go.
2. Open Orders. The chain appears at the top as numbered pills.
3. Type a name, then choose how the chain becomes steps:
4. Store lights — one step per light, still sequenced group by group. A light already placed by an earlier group is not repeated.
5. Store groups as fixtures — one step per group, so each group takes a single phase slot and moves as one light.

Store selection in patch order ignores the chain and uses the raw stage selection instead.

Running and editing

• Click an order tile to make it the active route; click Patch order to go back to fixture numbering.
• The tile shows how many steps it has and how many of those are multi-light units.
• Right-click for Edit, Select its fixtures, Reverse, and Delete.
• In the editor, each step can move up or down, merge into the step above it (folding two slots into one), split back into one step per light, or be removed.

Overlapping groups

A light can belong to several groups, which used to make its phase ambiguous. The active order settles it: order steps claim their lights first, in sequence, then any One fixture group still wholly unclaimed collapses into a unit, and whatever is left keeps patch order with one slot each.

Programming · Palettes

Palettes

The most important pool to set up first. A palette is a saved value for one feature, which is what lets you recall a color without disturbing where the lights are pointing.

The six feature tabs

How to store a palette

1. Pick a feature tab, for example Color.
2. Select fixtures and set the values you want in Channel control.
3. Type a name and press Store Color (the button is named after the active tab).
4. Repeat for the handful you will actually reuse: a few colors, four to eight positions, and a couple of dimmer levels.

Using palettes

• Click a tile to recall it into the Programmer for the current selection.
• Right-click for Recall, Add to cycle, Update from selection, and Delete.
• A blue outline means the Programmer is currently referencing that palette.
• The Fade row sets the recall crossfade: M follows the master Transition window, C uses the custom seconds beside it, and a dash means no fade.

Why palettes are referenced

When you record a cue using a palette, the cue remembers "Color equals the Blue palette", not raw numbers. Re-tint or re-aim the palette later and your cues follow. References resolve when the cue fires, so re-fire a cue to pick up a palette edit — a cue already live on stage will not change underneath you.

Programming · Gobos

Gobos

The Gobos window shows what the selected lights can project, as pictures. Click a tile and those lights go to that wheel slot — in the visualizer the haze inside the beam breaks into the pattern's rays, and the pool where it lands shows the projected image, rotated by the fixture's gobo rotation channel.

How to pick a gobo

1. Select some lights, then open Gobos from the toolbar. With nothing selected it lists every fixture type in the rig.
2. Each gobo wheel appears as a row of picture tiles, grouped by fixture type, with the slot each light is currently on outlined.
3. Click a tile to send those lights to that slot. The wheel channel lands in the Programmer, exactly like recalling a palette.

Where the pictures come from

A bundled catalogue of about 1,000 gobo images from QLC+ and the Open Fixture Library, joined to your fixtures by maker and model. Library fixtures know theirs automatically; built-in and ShowBuddy lights match on the model name their profile contains. A slot with no picture projects a plain cone.

Assigning your own pictures

1. Press Assign pictures, then click a tile to choose what that slot projects.
2. Search the whole catalogue by name, keyword, and maker. No gobo makes the slot a plain beam; Auto forgets your choice.
3. Drop your own PNGs into fixtures/gobos/ and they appear in the picker under Custom. Dark pixels block light, bright or transparent pixels pass it — even a photo of the pattern on a dark wall works.

Programming · Presets

Presets

Where a palette stores one feature, a preset stores the whole look — every Programmer value plus any running oscillations. Presets live on the Inspector's Presets tab, which is where they are stored and organised, and on the Presets board, which is where they are played.

How to store and organize presets

1. Build a look in the Programmer.
2. Open the Inspector's Presets tab (Alt-1), type a name, and press Store look.
3. Add a folder, or pick one in the store card first to file the look straight into it.
4. Drag pads onto a folder to file them, or onto each other to reorder.
5. Pin the ones you reach for constantly — they get a strip of their own at the top.
6. Right-click a pad for Duplicate, Move to, Set as chase source, To board, Edit pad, and Delete.
7. Recall one, change it, then press Update with current look to overwrite it.

A preset holds a stable id rather than a name, so a board pad, a deck key, an audio trigger, or the chase source all keep pointing at the right look through a rename or a reorder.

How a recall arrives

The recall row decides what a plain click does: Cut is instant, Fade takes the seconds set beside it, and As set follows the Transition window. A preset given a time of its own overrides the row, and shift-clicking any pad always cuts. Recall onto selection applies only the channels belonging to the lights you have selected.

The Presets board

A 4 × 9 page of pads, laid out exactly like the Stream Deck's Presets page — the same slots, the same reserved corners for select-all, Clear, and Tap. Turn Arrange on to point a pad at a preset, drag pads to swap them, and give each one its own colour, four-letter label, and artwork. Fill lays a whole folder out in one press. A show with no deck plugged in gets the same board on screen.

ShowBuddy banks

If your ShowBuddy show has preset banks, they appear in their own section below. One bank opens at a time; clicking a preset inside applies it to the whole rig. This is the fastest way to drop into a known look before you start editing. Import a bank preset — or a whole bank into a folder — and you can edit it like anything else you stored.

Blackout, Clear, and Release

Blackout, at the bottom of the Presets tab, writes a black frame and releases everything: the active preset, all running phasers, holds, any transition in progress, and the chase. It is the panic button, and unlike the Grand Master it also drops effects. Clear beside it is a staged version — encoders first, then effects, then blackout, one stage per press. Release only drops the lit-preset highlight and changes no output at all.

Programming · Scenes

Scenes

A scene captures what the Programmer is doing right now — including every running wave, with its phase — and plays it back as its own mixer layer. Where two preset recalls fight over the Programmer, several scenes genuinely run at once.

How to capture and play one

1. Build something in the Programmer — a look, a rolling phaser, anything moving.
2. Open Scenes from the toolbar, name it, and capture it.
3. Clear the Programmer. The scene keeps running on its own layer.
4. Click the scene's tile to toggle it on and off; capture more scenes and stack them.

How scenes fold together

Each scene also has its own level, and the pool order sets priority — move a scene up or down to decide who wins when two touch the same channel. Update re-captures a scene from the current Programmer.

Programming · Transition

Transition

Controls how the Programmer crossfades from its current look to a new one. Set it once and every palette and preset recall bound to M uses it.

Core controls

Spatial modes

1. Set Mode to Sphere scan for a rotating plane that sweeps the new look across the rig, or Radial for an expanding shell.
2. Tick Full editor to show the sphere on stage.
3. Drag the sphere on stage to place it, or type X, Y, Z.
4. Shift-drag the sphere to spin the Scan angle in Sphere scan mode.
5. Set Blend width from 0.02 to 0.60 for a hard edge or a soft wipe.
6. In Radial mode, tick Blast mode for a harder outward hit.

The M, C, and dash button

Palettes and Phasers each carry a small fade-binding button. M means the card follows this window's master Duration, C means it uses its own custom seconds, and a dash means no fade at all. That way one busking card can snap while the rest of the show breathes.

Effects & Motion · Phasers

Phasers

The biggest window in the app, and the heart of live effects. A phaser is built from channel components, each of which can sit still, animate, or move to a static value and then animate.

Building a phaser

1. Select fixtures. The Common channels row shows the channels they actually have.
2. Click a channel button to add it as a component, for example PAN and TILT.
3. Use Add special for rarer channels like gobo, prism, fine, or macro.
4. In each component card set the mode: Oscillation, Static plus oscillation, or Static position.
5. Dial Amount, pick a Rate, choose a Waveform, then shape it with Shape, Phase, and Invert.
6. Press Apply, or tick Live to hear every edit as you make it.

Spreading it across the rig

The four store buttons

The tile pool

• Tiles are sorted into Intensity and color and Movement columns.
• Click a tile to start it, click again to stop. A white outline means running.
• Turn on Edit mode to click tiles into the editor and tweak them in place without applying or stopping anything. A yellow outline marks the tile being edited, and changes save instantly.
• Right-click a tile for Edit, Apply, Stop, Follow master beat, Bind to selection, Unbind, Overwrite with editor, and Delete.
• Give each phaser a card color so your busking pool is readable at a glance.

Gobos and effects

The collapsing Gobos and effects section lists every effect channel on the selection with a fine value control and one chip per named band, so you can jump straight to a gobo instead of hunting for its DMX value. Press Store FX tile to keep the result.

Effects & Motion · Oscillator

Oscillator

Hand-built, per-channel motion. Where a phaser drives a whole effect across a selection, the Oscillator animates exactly the channels you armed in Channel control.

How to animate a channel

1. Click one or more row labels in Channel control to arm them.
2. Open Oscillator and tick Enabled.
3. Set Amount as a percentage of the channel's range.
4. Pick a Speed: Free, 4 bars, 2 bars, 1 bar, 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8.
5. Shape the wave with Shape, and flip it with Invert.
6. Raise Offset to fan the phase between armed channels — 0.25 gives 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, which makes a chase.

Global engine controls

While anything is animating you get Master speed (0.1 to 4.0), Tempo in BPM, a Free speed slider for oscillators set to Free, and Stop all, which renders the current animated frame and freezes it as a static look — a neat way to capture a moment mid-effect.

Custom waveforms

1. Open the Custom waveforms section and press New.
2. Drag points in the editor canvas to shape the curve. End points stay locked horizontally.
3. Double-click to add a break point.
4. Right-click a section for Point to point, Curved, or Square / hold.
5. Set Travel to Forward or Boomerang, and Stripes to repeat the drawn wave up to 16 times per cycle.
6. Name it, press Save waveform, then select it in any Waveform dropdown — including inside Phasers.

Effects & Motion · Chases

Chases

Non-destructive moving overlays. A chase takes a preset and injects it across the rig in a moving shape, on top of whatever else is running.

The twelve shapes

How to run a chase

1. Store a look as a preset first — the transport buttons stay disabled until a source preset is picked.
2. Choose it in the Inject preset dropdown.
3. Click a shape chip.
4. Set Band width, Speed, Direction, and Tilt. Stripes adds a Stripe count.
5. Choose an Edge: Soft pulse for a gentle wash or Hard band for a crisp cut.
6. Press Start chase, or Send pulse for the one-shot kind. Press Stop chase to end it.

Positioning and busking

Tick Full editor to show the chase sphere on stage, then drag it into place or set X, Y, Z and Start angle numerically. Shift-drag the sphere to spin the start angle.

Throb dimmers surges every dimmer to full and decays back over half a second. Mash it with the kick drum.

Effects & Motion · Palette sequences

Palette cycles and sequences

Inside the Palettes window is a small engine that rolls through a list of palettes. It is the fastest way to get moving color across a rig without building a phaser.

How to build a cycle

1. Shift-click two or more palette tiles. They appear in the Cycle row; click one there to remove it.
2. Pick a rate: 4 bars, 2 bars, 1 bar, 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8.
3. Pick a pattern: Wave rolls across the rig, Wings mirrors it, Random scatters it.
4. Press Cycle to start and Stop cycle to end it.

Shaping it

Saving a sequence

1. Open Saved sequences.
2. Name it and press Save. You need at least two palettes in the cycle.
3. Press Folder and turn on Drag mode to file sequences into folders.
4. Click a tile to load and start it. Right-click for Load without starting, Overwrite with current cycle, Follow master beat, Move to, and Delete.

Effects & Motion · Audio in

Audio in

Pick any audio source the computer can hear, watch its spectrum, let the beat tracker press TAP for you, and draw trigger bands on the graph — when the bass crosses this line, throw this palette at that group.

Picking a source

• On Windows, every output device is offered as a System audio loopback source — play a track and light it, no cabling.
• Microphones and other inputs work on every platform.
• On macOS and Linux, capturing system audio needs a virtual device such as BlackHole or a monitor source.

Following the beat

The analyser folds a live FFT into 64 log-spaced bands and feeds spectral flux into a predict-and-correct beat tracker. Each detected beat becomes a tap on the existing beat machinery — the tracker is a very patient drummer pressing the TAP button — and a confidence readout says how periodic the music actually is. Everything that follows the master beat follows the band.

Band triggers

1. Draw a band on the spectrum graph, or start from a named range: Sub, Bass, Low-mid, Mid, High-mid, Presence, Air.
2. Set the threshold line. The trigger fires when the band's energy crosses it.
3. Pick what it paints: a palette or a native preset, aimed at a group or the whole rig.
4. Choose how it fires: Gate holds while the band is above the line with attack and release shaping, One-shot fires on each crossing then decays, and Follow tracks how far above the line the band sits.
5. Pick a merge mode — Override, Highest, or Add — the same choices scenes use.

Effects & Motion · Beat

Beat

The master clock. Turn it on, tap along with the band, and every card that opts in — phasers, palette sequences, oscillators on musical rates — locks to the song.

How to sync to a band

1. Open Beat and tick Master BPM.
2. Tap the big TAP button, or press the space bar, on the beat — or open Audio in and let the beat tracker tap for you.
3. Watch the four-circle bar indicator. The orange circle is beat one.
4. Use x2 or ÷2 if the detected tempo lands on the wrong subdivision.
5. Pause for more than two and a half seconds, then tap again to reset the downbeat.

How tapping is interpreted

• Taps more than 2.5 seconds apart start a fresh run.
• Up to nine taps shape the tempo, which is clamped between 30 and 300 BPM.
• The first tap of a run marks the bar downbeat; later taps nudge to the nearest beat.
• Drift is applied to the live look, any running transition, the chase, and the palette cycle when it is following the master beat.

The time machine

Below the tap controls is a set of transport tools that bend the flow of animation time itself. Everything on a clock — phasers, oscillators, chases, palette cycles — follows, and status pills across the top always say what is currently in force.

Playback · Stacks

Stacks

A stack is a cue list: an ordered set of looks you step through with Go. This is theatre-style playback, and it is where tracking lives.

How to build a stack

1. Press New and rename the stack in the text field.
2. Build a look in the Programmer: a group, some palettes, a dimmer, maybe a phaser.
3. Set Fade in seconds.
4. Press Store cue. The button is disabled while the Programmer is empty.
5. Change the look and press Store cue again for cue 2, and so on.

Tracking

A cue records only the channels you touched. Channels you did not touch track through from earlier cues, exactly like a real console. That keeps cues small and makes edits painless: change a color in cue 2 and every later cue that never sets a color follows.

The record mask

The Record row has one toggle per feature: Dimmer, Position, Color, Beam, Focus, and Control. Turn off Position to store a color-only cue. All toggles on records everything.

Playing a stack

Playback · Decks

Decks

The executor bar across the bottom of the screen. This is your hands-on surface for running the show live.

Grand Master

One vertical fader on the left, labelled GM, scaling every dimmer in the rig with a percentage readout underneath. Pull it down for a quick fade to black.

Stack strips

1. Each strip shows the stack name, turning green while it plays.
2. Below it, the current cue name, or a dash when the stack is off.
3. Ride the vertical Master level fader to fade that whole cue list in and out.
4. Press Go to fire or advance cues.
5. Press Off to release the stack so it stops outputting. It is disabled unless the stack is playing.

Playback · Stream Deck

Stream Deck

Plug in any Elgato Stream Deck over USB and DMXexpress takes it over as a control surface — no Elgato software or plugins involved. Every key is drawn live by the app with its own color, label, and artwork. Whichever deck answers first is used, and if it is unplugged mid-show it reconnects by itself.

Turning it on

1. Open Palettes and check Send to Deck — it is on by default, and the detected model is named beside it.
2. If another program is holding the deck, close it so DMXexpress can reach the device.
3. Turn the Mode knob to cycle through the four pages.

The four pages

The knobs and the touch strip

On the Stream Deck Plus XL the touch strip is a live readout: the grand master with a level bar, the BPM pulsing on the beat, the current page, and the programmer knob's channel and value.

Building your phaser pages

1. Open Phasers and find the deck section: one tile per key, in pages of 36.
2. Assign a phaser to a slot, then give the key its own color, label, and artwork — bullseye, stage light, wave, burst, rainbow, and more.
3. Turn the Page knob to scroll pages while the deck is on the Phaser page.
4. Pages persist in phaser_deck.json, so your busking surface survives restarts.

The same board, on screen

You do not need the hardware to get the surface. The Phaser board is the same 4 × 9 page of pads the deck's Phaser page shows — the same slots, the same reserved corners for select-all, Clear, and Tap — drawn in a window you can pop onto a second monitor. Pressing a pad starts or stops its phaser. Turn Arrange on to assign a phaser, symbol, and colour to a pad, drag pads to swap them, and right-click to clear one.

The Presets board is its twin for looks, and works the same way. Design in the Phasers window, play from the board — the two sit side by side nicely with one of them popped out.

Playback · Command line

Command line

A single text box at the very bottom. Type a verb, press Enter. Much faster than the mouse once the vocabulary is in your fingers. Numbers are 1-based and in pool order.

Anything unrecognised is reported in the Log, as are usage errors such as Usage: gm 0-100. There is no command history or autocomplete.

Playback · Views

Views

Named snapshots of your workspace. A view captures both the open windows and the stage camera position, so you can flip between a programming desk and a playback desk instantly.

How to save a view

1. Arrange the windows you want open and park the stage camera where you like it.
2. Type a name next to Name.
3. Press Save.
4. Click the view's button later to restore both the layout and the camera.
5. Press the trash button to delete a view.

What a view captures

The camera snapshot and fly-mode state, plus the visibility of Art-Net, Transition, Chases, Groups, Orders, Scenes, Audio, Palettes, Phasers, Stacks, Decks, Command, Log, and Oscillator. Beat, Gobos, Patch, Configs, DMX monitor, Settings, and the Views window itself are not part of a view, so utility windows stay where you left them.

Output & Fixes · Art-Net

Art-Net output

DMXexpress streams two contiguous DMX universes over Art-Net at roughly 40 frames per second. The Art-Net panel docks to the top of the window and is where you choose the destination.

How to get output running

1. Set Universe in the top toolbar. Slots 1–512 go there, 513–1024 to the next universe.
2. Press ArtPoll to broadcast a discovery packet.
3. Click a discovered node row to unicast to it. Each row shows the IP address, the short name, and the long name underneath.
4. Click Broadcast 255.255.255.255 to go back to broadcasting to everything.
5. For a node that does not answer ArtPoll, type its address into Manual target IP and press Use.

A valid manual address is confirmed in the Log; an invalid one reports Invalid IP address. While no nodes have answered, the panel simply reads Searching.

Output & Fixes · Network

The Network screen

Everything needed to get lighting data out of the console and into a node — and to see why it is not arriving. Protocol setup, live diagnostics, a troubleshooting checklist, test patterns, and a packet monitor, in four tabs. Open it from Settings → Network….

The status strip

It sits above the tabs and stays there whichever one you are on, because those are the four numbers that matter: is it sending, how fast, to where, and any errors. Frames actually sent in the last second should read about 40. Enabled, but no frame has left in the last second and Nothing is being sent are the two readings worth acting on.

Setup

• Choose the protocol: Art-Net, sACN (E1.31), or both at once.
• Pick the network interface to send from, or leave it on any interface.
• Choose how Art-Net packets are addressed — automatic (unicast to the picked node, else broadcast), limited broadcast, or multicast.
• Set the base universe. The screen spells out the Art-Net Port-Address it maps to, Net switch and Sub-Net switch included, so you can match a node's front panel without arithmetic.

Settings are saved to network.json and pushed to the output thread as one change.

Nodes & sources

Every Art-Net node and sACN source heard on the wire, with its IP address, names, firmware, and which universes its ports are set to. A node that has not answered for five minutes drops off the list; a silent sACN source drops after thirty seconds. The table flags the common mismatch out loud: none of this node's output ports is set to a universe we send.

Checklist

Live checks that say what is wrong and what to do about it, one finding per row, each marked OK, warning, or fail. It is the first place to look when a rig is dark and you do not yet know why — it reads the same state the other tabs show, and turns it into sentences. Copy diagnostics puts the whole report on the clipboard for a bug report or a message to whoever runs the network.

Test & monitor

1. Run Full on — every channel at 255 — to answer the first question: does anything light at all?
2. Or run a chase pattern to walk the universe channel by channel and find a mis-addressed fixture.
3. Set how long the pattern holds before the show comes back, or end it at once.
4. Watch the packet monitor underneath: the last fifty packets with their direction, kind, and destination. Freeze the list to read it while packets keep flowing underneath.

Output & Fixes · DMX monitor

DMX monitor

A live view of all 1024 output channels, plus a per-channel override so you can test wiring end to end without touching your show.

Reading the list

• Each row is one DMX slot: address, a level bar, the numeric value, an override checkbox, and the owning fixture's name.
• The level bar is green normally and orange while that channel is overridden.
• The header reports either No overrides active or a warning with the override count.

How to test a fixture

1. Open DMX from the toolbar.
2. Scroll to the address you want. The fixture name on the right helps you orient.
3. Tick its checkbox. The channel is forced to 255 on the wire, on top of everything else.
4. Drag the override value to test a specific level.
5. Press Clear all to drop every override when you are done.

Output & Fixes · Freeze & blackout

Freeze and blackout

Three different ways to stop, each with a different scope. Knowing which one to reach for is the difference between a clean save and a dead stage.

Freeze

The FREEZE button in the top toolbar holds the exact current output and pauses every oscillator, transition, chase, palette cycle, cue fade, and timed ramp. UNFREEZE resumes every one of them at the same phase, because the paused duration is added to each clock rather than reset. Use it to hold a look while you go fix something.

Blackout

The Blackout button at the bottom of the Inspector's Presets tab writes a black frame and releases the active preset, all running phasers, holds, the transition, and the chase. This is the full stop. A BLACKOUT pill appears in the Inspector's context line while it is in force, so you always know.

Clear, beside it, is the gentler version: one press drops the encoders, a second drops the effects, a third blacks out. Reach for it when you want the stage back a layer at a time rather than all at once.

Command line blackout

Typing black or bo releases every stack and clears the Programmer. Playback stops, but stage effects owned by the Inspector are untouched.

Grand Master

Pulling GM to zero scales every dimmer to nothing but leaves everything running underneath, so pushing it back up restores the show exactly. Note that fixtures with no dimmer channel, and phaser hold or lock tiles, ignore it.

Output & Fixes · Log

Log

A small floating window that narrates everything the app does. It is display-only by design: no filters, no severity levels, no clear button.

What lands in it

• How many fixtures loaded from the patch, and any patch warnings.
• Store and recall confirmations for groups, palettes, presets, and cues.
• Command line feedback, including usage errors and unknown commands.
• Art-Net target changes and invalid IP addresses.
• View changes.

How to use it

1. Click Log in the top toolbar.
2. Scroll back through the history; the view auto-follows new entries.
3. Use A- / A+ to change its text size.

Output & Fixes · Files

Files on disk

Every part of your show is plain, readable JSON in the working directory. Nothing is locked in a binary format, so you can read it, diff it, and put it in version control.

inspector.json and network.json describe the machine rather than the show, and are deliberately kept out of saved configurations. That is why loading a colleague's show never moves your panels or re-points your output.

Output & Fixes · Plugins

Plugins

A plugin is one script file that extends the console: it can paint its own effect layer under the programmer, open a window of its own controls, or re-tint the whole theme. Scripts are sandboxed — no file, network, or system access, and runaway loops are stopped with an error instead of a hang.

Installing one

1. Download a .rhai file — the plugin marketplace lists reviewed ones.
2. Open Plugins from the toolbar and drag the file onto the window. Or press Open folder, copy it in, and press Reload all.
3. Tick the plugin to enable it. Untick to stop it instantly.

The window, row by row

How plugin layers sit in the mix

Plugin layers render with the scenes, underneath the programmer — so whatever a script paints, your own programming always wins on the channels you are holding. Each script picks how it folds in: mix takes its channels over, highest keeps whichever is brighter, add sums on top.

Errors

A script that fails shows its error in red in the Plugins window, and the failing hook is parked so it cannot spam. Fix the file and press Reload. print("...") output lands in the Log window.

Output & Fixes · Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

The problems people actually hit, and the one-line fix for each.

My playback does nothing

The Programmer is still holding those channels. Press Clear prog or type clear. Check the active-channel count reads zero.

My palette edit did not change the cue

Palette references resolve when a cue fires. Re-fire the cue with Go or its row play button.

A cue is missing something I set

Store only records channels you actually touched, filtered by the Record mask. Confirm you moved that channel and that its feature toggle was on.

Some fixtures will not dim from the Grand Master

GM scales dimmer channels only. Raw RGB fixtures have no dimmer, so use a dimmer palette or drive the color channels down instead.

A fixture is stuck on and ignores everything

Check for a phaser hold or lock tile still running, and check the DMX monitor for a leftover channel override. Both outrank normal output.

Nothing reaches my node

Open the Network screen and read the Checklist tab — it names the fault and the fix in a sentence. Failing that: confirm the universe in the toolbar, press ArtPoll and select the node, or set a manual target IP. Verify the fixture's address falls inside slots 1–1024, and read the Log for the last target change.

Packets are going out but the rig is dark

The node is probably listening on a different universe. The Network screen's Nodes & sources tab says so outright when a node's output ports do not match anything you send. Run Full on from the Test & monitor tab to settle whether the problem is on the wire or in your patch.

I cannot find the Setups button any more

It moved. Setups now live in the Inspector's Build tab, under the outliner, along with Clear rig and Reset lights.

Everything is moving but nothing responds to edits

Check whether FREEZE is engaged in the toolbar. The button reads UNFREEZE and turns blue while output is held.

A fixture I patched vanished

Open Patch. It may be in the Removed list, or Include ShowBuddy patch may be unticked. Press Restore all to bring excluded fixtures back.