While CES 2024 is full of exciting new hardware, we’ve also been blessed this year with some great new software – and none are more exciting to me personally than Nanoleaf’s new Orchestrator software.
Nanoleaf announced the Spring 2024 release along with news of its new outdoor lights (which I also saw at CES, and they are Magnificent), describing the software as providing a “real-time audiovisual experience”.
I admit I was skeptical at first; It’s not the easiest software to make, and it’s very ambitious, but after having some hands-on experiences with the software at CES, I can safely say that it’s one of the best lighting developments smart ones this year.
Bring in time
In fairness, a few smart lighting manufacturers offer software that intelligently interprets music, but many of them simply create movements or pulses according to the selected light profile or perhaps create a fairly latent color-reactive scene ; but it is very rare that they offer both.
Additionally, with the exception of Philips Hue’s Spotify integration, most music performances on smart lights leverage small microphones built into the device that are easily confused with ambient sound.
That’s all about to change with the introduction of Orchestrator, Nanoleaf’s new desktop music performance engine, which analyzes the music itself to create a complete light show with your devices. Not only can Orchestrator create a color palette based on the mood of the song, but it also lets you customize which lights respond to which parts of a song.
So, for example, you can set your bulbs to respond to the bass line while your smart light panels respond to the mids or highs of a song. You can also select your own favorite palette.
Dance! Boogie Wonderlaaa and…
My partner is a music producer, so when I visited Nanoleaf’s demo suite, I quickly booted up one of its chillscape techno tracks on Spotify to test it out. Thanks to Orchestrator, the lights translated its ambiance into a rapidly pulsing, clear blue and white light show that was truly breathtaking; and not just because I’m my partner’s number one fangirl.
To see how much variety the software offered, we also played a relaxing ambient track, which Orchestrator translated into warm yellow lighting with a gentle, relaxing flickering motion.
At the time of writing, Orchestrator is a desktop-exclusive experience compatible with the Nanoleaf desktop app, leveraging the audio spectrum of your device’s output to automatically generate stunning light shows.
This marks a major upgraded to Nanoleaf’s existing Rhythm software, and it’s hands down the best audio interpretation software I’ve ever seen available to consumers.
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