Blizzard Lighting EclipseDMX Easy to Use Dmx Controlling Software

Received what I expected and on time

Awesome software. Best I have found. Highly recommend it

The absolute best solution for the beginner or novice user.

After owning several of these dongles over the years, I'll say that I can't stand the software. We go with this software just because anyone can operate it, and you can keep similar show files between different light rigs and computers. It's fine for small events and small companies, but if you have an event where you need something reliable, go get a real light console. The software is so buggy and crashes too easy.The software has two "modes", Playback and Programming mode. You basically go into program mode, select your fixtures and set your and build the look you want, then record it to a button to use in the playback screen. Sometimes that's just too much for the software and it can't even handle that. You're guaranteed to crash the software at a live show if you're programming on the fly. If most of your lights blackout with the lost of DMX, the stage is going to be dark for a while as the software takes it's sweet time to boot back up. That's not good for any event. After updating a complicated scene, the software will decide to delete the scene data, because forget the time and effort that went into creating that scene anyway. Decide to swap around DMX channels on your fixtures? Well, good news to you, you'll have to reprogram every scene just for those lights. Got a similar light with slightly different profile? Why not just keep the scene data and morph the profile? Too bad, you have to reprogram every scene for that light too.The RGB effect generator is garbage and doesn't seem to group correctly with your number of fixtures. When building a complex scene, the software is bound to screw up a step, you would think it would be easy to add and remove steps in the scene, but they failed miserably with even that.Terrible fixture selection in the patch menu, it's missing most of Blizzard Lighting's products. They don't even update the gobo images in the program mode. Fixtures cannot have more than 32 channels of DMX, otherwise you have to patch multiple fixtures for a single light.The web server is a neat idea but poorly implemented. It does not keep the layout of the buttons on the program. Plus, when you navigate through the pages, it does it on the program too, vise versa, so you can't have multiple people operating. You can't even trigger multiple buttons from the webpage or operate fog/strobe controls.The 3D Visualizer is just a waste of time, you can't adjust the position of the fixtures by XYZ coordinates like every other software. Their positions are based on the layout of your fixtures in the programming screen. The fixture models are terrible and the 3D room uses a generic texture on all sides. The camera views are terrible.Another issue, We swap computers quite a bit for our different systems, they all use the same show file or scenes. I found that when you program a bunch of buttons on a high resolution computer, then you go to run on a lower resolution laptop, most of your buttons are off the screen and there's nothing you can do about it.The keyboard shortcuts are okay, the strobe control with the space bar and the fog trigger with the insert key and finally, the blackout with the delete key. You can hold the control key to select multiple buttons/sequences, that works well. However, I've found a bug after using too many keyboard shortcuts, the software gets confused about how the scene data stored on a button and your scene won't look right, it'll correct itself after a while, but then it'll just do it again.The built in tap tempo / sound active is terrible. After you tap your tempo for the current song, there is so much latency with the software that the tempo would be off from what you tapped.Older versions of the dongle won't work with newer versions of the software, The dongles were a pain to update, we have more then 5 and its scary because if something goes wrong while updating, you screwed and good luck trying to get your dongles to work again. The dongles are light, powered by 5 volts of USB and you can mount it just about anywhere. The dongle doesn't keep outputting it's last DMX value if the software closes.Blizzard's Eclipse software is just a modified version of Enlighten or Disco DMX, whichever software came first. If all the lighting companies were competing to release the worst quality products, Blizzard would win the first place trophy. Maybe instead of putting jokes in their manuals, they should concentrate on releasing better products.Blizzard seriously needs to step their game on this software, it is too buggy and has several flaws. It has failed me on some very important shows. Go with something like American DJ's MyDMX if you want reliable software. The price for the dongle is rather high like it's failure rate.I don't know how I've manged to put up with this software, but the company I work for insists sticking with it. I guess the dongles did pay for themselves after a while.

Probably the worst software out there. The small amount of money you might save by going this route vs Channel Sys and Martin MPC will be more than made up for by the extra time and headache you spend trying to trick this program into doing what you want it to do. Software is full of glitches and crashes constantly so make sure you save every 5 minutes. I would give this one star except the company actually does answer the phone and offer support so they get 2 stars. I feel bad for the tech support guy because there are so many issues I am sure he is super busy.