Can I share layout/settings between two computers?

[DavidJ247]

Tonight juniorJ watched me messing around with xlights and instantly took an interest (I was secretly hoping he would, he loves music and all things techie so this is right up his alley). So my question is, if I set up all of the elements/layout on my computer, could we then share the layout to his computer so that he could sequence his own songs?

 

[Superman]

You sure can. I save my file to the dropbox and work on it with 3 different computers.

 

[AAH]

You don't need to dropbox it if you don't want to. Copying over the xml files is all you need to do. I had the wife and rugrats sequencing on another computer last Xmas and I just copied the resultant files back when I was ready for them. Having 2 copies rather than a shared copy allows for less likelihood of files being totally trashed by accidental mistakes.

 

[Gilrock]

Yep just copy over your Show folder. If you don't have the exact same path on both machines there can be problems in some spots because we store full file paths to certain things like the audio and images. We were going to try to come up with a better way to handle that this year. I like to use "C:\xLights" on all machines and then I don't have to worry about it.

 

[mararunr]

I would avoid a shared drive situation like OneDrive or Google Drive. I tried it for a period last year and it was an utter disaster because of the live updating in more than one place. Dropbox is not live updating I don't believe....and as Gil points out, make sure you use the same path on all the different machines otherwise there is a lot of cleanup when you try to consolidate in November for actual show time.

 

[DavidJ247]

Brilliant, thanks all.

 

[gerry]

And if you don't/cant have the same paths , then it is quite simple to open the relevant xlights_ and sequence xml files using an editor and do a find and replace.
(which is what I do , cause the 'user name' is in my directory structure)

 

[keithsw1111]

This is on my list as something to fix. Make all paths relative.

 

[gerry]

Wonderful !

Not that it is difficult to manage now if you know how, but this question (or similar ones) comes up very frequently for newer people.

I had also put in a request in github for an enhancement for a warning if an image could not be found , as currently xl simply ignores the absence of the image and u end up with picture effects 'not playing' the effect. Took me a whole evening once to figure out why (I had just tidied up some of the image locations) , resaved later and pushed to the FPP.

 

[Gilrock]

This is on my list as something to fix. Make all paths relative.

I would have fixed this a long time ago but there isn't consensus on the best way to fix it. There are a lot of aspects to this problem. Just making everything relative paths won't work because some users need fixed paths for some things. Some folks don't even keep their audio on the same logical drive letter. Hard to come up with a scheme that satisfies how all users want to work. We used to have everything as relative and it changed due to the complaints and then caused a new set of complaints. Just look at the complexity of the code to open a file. It has to search like 4 to 5 different locations to find the audio. And now we have image files and data layer sources that have paths in addition to the audio.

 

[DavidJ247]

Back to this topic..... thanks to all for the help earlier in the year, I'm working on this again now and I've run into some trouble. Hoping someone can point me in the right direction.


I can't seem to transfer my layout (and previews) from one pc to another? When I try to open a sequence on the second pc it opens using an old layout and asks me to re-map some elements which have been changed/renamed. I have copied the .fseq and .xml files to a folder on the second pc, when this didn't work I copied my entire show directory folder to the second pc but still no luck.
What am I missing?

 

[keithsw1111]

Have you set the show folder correctly on the other PC?

 

[DavidJ247]

Have you set the show folder correctly on the other PC?

I think so Keith, I created a new folder on JuniorJ's mac and pointed xlights to that as the show directory, then copied everything from the show directory folder on my pc to the new folder on his. I can load a sequence which was created on my machine and it will play on his, but it tries to play it on an old layout, not the current one?

 

[Gilrock]

You said you pointed xlights to the show directory then you copied the files over. Did you close xlights first? Normally you need to do all the file copying with xLights closed or it will overwrite what you copied. I like to create the show directory, put the files in it, then open xLights and point it to that show folder. If you point it there first then you gotta close xLights, delete the files in that directory and then copy over the files. You should see the correct Layout when you point it to the new show directory. You need to move the sequence over to the new show directory and open and render it. You can't just bring in files from another show folder without having to open them and go through the re-mapping process.

 

[DavidJ247]

Mystery solved! Thanks Keith and Gil, I found that the xlights files I was copying over were earlier ones (keybindings, rgb effects, networks) but the .fseq files were all up to date, so I was feeding xlights with new sequence data but old layout data. Fixed my mistake and it works like a charm.