Luminair

Took a leap of faith and purchased this app back in 2016 for close to $100. It was the most I paid for an iOS app at that time. Since then the app was really good to me. Programming and running shows from my iPad and even phone at times worked flawlessly for years for video shoots, formal events, musical concerts, and a few theatrical shows. However, when I was ready to upgrade, I really couldn’t believe the company would drop all of us prior loyal customers like that and force us to enter a subscription without a discount or anything. I will not upgrade and will find a replacement mostly because of the principle of the situation. I will miss you though. Solid app that seemed to handle everything I threw at it. It’s been fun. Truly sad to see you go :( UPDATE: Thank you for responding and explaining. As previously mentioned I found this app to be an extremely solid app that surprisingly handled multiple fixtures and scenes flawlessly over the last few years. I would have hated to move to another workflow and now look forward to many more years using this app.

I will admit that I am frustrated. But the app crashes about 4 or 5 times an hour. Often when you create a new sequence and forget to change it from looping to linear. It just keeps running with no chance to stop it and then eventually it crashes. I shouldn’t have to but I know how to work around it. Just change it immediately to linear or add ‘fade in’ and hold times to the scenes so you have a chance to stop it. My biggest pet peeve is that it changes the number of parameters and worse, the midi signal that is supposed to trigger a sequence or a scene at will. I spent 3 weeks creating 150 scenes for a Pink Floyd show and now that I want to trigger them via midi (I bought the add on) there is complete chaos. They know that the app had this problem for over a year and have not addressed it. I makes controlling via midi absolutely useless. Support is sketchy at best. Been waiting for about a week for a response now. Documentation is incomplete. There may be features hidden somewhere that would mitigate the issue but not all options are documented. I don’t care about $100 and then some that I wasted. I do care about 3 weeks of time and doubting myself that I did something wrong. I didn’t. I can only guess that the 4.8 stars are from people who only ply around but for professional work this is not recommended. I will make it work somehow for the show we have planned because it’s too late change the app now. But that will be the last time.

Luminair is simple and useful, because it has editable scenes with faders that can be easily changed. Luminair has always been very buggy since the very very beginning, and that has not changed very much over the years honestly. The app still often crashes randomly, especially when saving project files, or creating a custom button icon with the camera, despite the latest iOS updates and app updates. The app also loves to suddenly set all channels to off (BLACKOUT) when first loading a saved project file, despite that it was not saved in that state. The workaround for that bug is to turn off the output in the app, load the project, then turn the output back on again. That will prevent the sudden “BLACKOUT” (for no reason) from happening. I often find this app’s simplicity frustrating, especially with the highly limited effects options available, and the inability to use those effects easily, without needing to create duplicate faders mapped to duplicate channels that have those different effects patched into them. I have found the developers have not been very willing to make suggested changes, like the ability to lock project, scene and channel editing ability with independent separate special passwords, in order to make the app more useable in a permanent install environment. Oh well... this app is better than most apps, and a sharp stick in the eye...