Tomic Lightings is a full-featured DMX console in your laptop. All you need is a PC and an inexpensive interface — and you have a desk that does the same job as hardware costing thousands.
A production rehearsed down to the last detail. It has to land the same every single night.
No two songs are the same. You react to the mood on stage.
A big rig, pro gear, planning well in advance.
The complete feature list lives on the Features page. Here's what matters most.
For the console to know which DMX channels a fixture has and what they do, it needs the fixture's profile. Tomic works with GDTF, the industry standard published by the manufacturers themselves — one click imports the profile complete with channel ranges and gobo images. And for a fixture no profile exists for, there's the editor: build one from the DMX chart in the manual in a few minutes, and it's yours for good.
Patch and profiles →Scenes, palettes and effects are stored against named fixture groups — Front wash, Heads, Blinders — never against DMX addresses. When you expand or re-address the rig, new fixtures inherit everything already programmed and the show never needs rebuilding. That's how the big desks work — and exactly how Tomic works too.
Groups — the foundation →Colours, positions and beam settings are stored as palettes, and every scene remembers which palette each value came from. Arrive at a different venue, re-aim the Singer position — and the correction carries into every scene that uses it. On the big desks this principle is called reference programming, and it saves more time than anything else.
Palettes →The output can simultaneously feed a visualizer — Capture, Depence and others — so you program the whole show at a desk, over a 3D model of the stage. On site, the same data goes to the real fixtures and you only touch up positions for the venue.
Visualizer →Connect a Behringer X‑Touch — its motorized faders follow the show by themselves and the scribble strips show names — or a Novation Launchpad with colour pads for scenes and tempo. Any MIDI controller learns its function from a single press. The console also accepts OSC commands (TouchOSC, QLab, Companion), and your phone becomes a remote via a QR code.
Controllers →Data travels to the fixtures over an ordinary computer network using the Art-Net and sACN protocols, or down a cable through a USB DMX interface of the Enttec kind. Nodes on the network are discovered automatically, and an indicator in the top bar confirms the output is running. It can also receive DMX from another console and merge it with its own output.
Output to fixtures →Tomic Lightings is free forever — with every feature, no watermark and no trial period. The free version lights 2 DMX universes (1,024 channels) and holds 50 fixtures, 50 scenes and 50 sequences, which is enough for an ordinary club or theatre show; groups, faders and palettes are unlimited. A license unlocks all four universes and removes the limits — €40/year, or €200 one-time, forever. Details in the pricing.