Tips & Tricks
for editing AmbiTracks

Connecting to your Hue bridge

  • Click on "Apply on hue lights" to open the settings panel
  • Click the "Find Bridge" button
  • If no bridge is found, you can manually enter the IP address of the bridge
  • Press the button on your hue bridge and then press the "Authenticate with Bridge" button within 30 seconds to retreive a username to communicate with the bridge API.
  • If no username is returned, you can enter one manually. Please note that the username should be whitelisted on the hue bridge.
  • Click "Reload Lights" to load all the lights and groups from your bridge
  • Assign tracks 1,2,3 to a light or a group of lights.
  • Make sure to save the settings!
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The Editor

Basics
You can create tracks and place segments on a track. During a segment, the light will have the chosen color. When the segment ends, the light will begin to transition to the color of the next segment.
So during a segment, nothing happens. The magic happens in the time during the transition from one segment to the next. Then the colors of the lights change.

Making a segment long, often results in a boring light track, because during a segment, the light does not change. You're in control of how fast the transition will be, by placing segments close to eachother of far apart.

Tip: keep your segments short, the magic happens in-between the segments!

Normal editing mode
Normal editing mode is when the YouTube video is stopped. You can add new segments to your timeline and they always get added at the end of a track.

A newly added segment will copy it's properties like length, color etc from the previous segment if that's available.

Live editing mode
Live editing mode is when the YouTube video is playing. New segments are always added at the current time in the YouTube video. A new segment will have the same color, length etc as the previous segment.

If a segment is added when there's already another segment on the timeline, the existing segment will be shortend so segments won't overlap.

NOTE: During Live editing mode, the keyboard shortcuts are available!

Keyboard Shortcuts
Make sure your mouse focus is on the website and not the YouTube video for this to work (by clicking on the webpage after starting a YouTube video). By pressing the number on your keyboard matching a Track number, a new segment will be added on that track. So by pressing 1, a new segment will be added on the first track.

This is a really powerful feature when you want to add segments exactly matching a beat in a music video. Just press the keys on your keyboard to add a lot of segments. Keyboard shortcuts only work in live editing mode (when the YouTube video is playing). The new segment is copied from the previous segment, so make sure that segment is exactly right before making lots of copies.

Alerts
An alert is a special command to the hue lights. It means, go from minimal brightness, to maximum brightness, back to minimal brightness and back to the original state. This is useful when you want to quickly flash the lights on and off. You can create an alert by checking the Alert checkbox when clicking on a segment on the timeline.

The best effect is achieved when the lights are first turned off before using alerts. Alerts always take +- 400 ms and the duration is ignored. When a light is off, you can't change it's color. So doing an alert while the light is off will always result in the same color the light was before it was turned off.

Turning lights off
Use the color black to turn lights off.