xLights is powerful software that you use to create / choreograph your holiday light show—this is where you map your layout, add music and create effects.
Simple Explanation:
xLights is where you design your show in a drag & drop format
What xLights Does
🔧
Creates Sequences
Design your xLights sequences using an intuitive interface. Apply numerous effects to your lights.
🎶
Integrate Music
Add music, with automatic beat tracking to choreograph your lights to the music.
🎄
Visualize your show
Visualize a 2D or 3D model of your house and lights without stepping outside.
📡
Interface with FPP
Use FPP Connect to manage your light shows on your FPP instance.
Per their website, “xLights is a free and open source program that enables you to design, create and play amazing lighting displays through the use of DMX controllers, E1.31 Ethernet controllers and more” . What does this mean to you? It means that xLights can control a whole bunch of different types of lights and devices (including DMX, which is what they use for professional stage lighting, fog machines and other crazy stuff). xLights can control WS2811 and WS2814 Pixels. It can also control most consumer grade Twinkly devices natively right out of the box (this wasn’t true several years ago – you had to use 3rd party solutions to make it work).
xLights is free to download and use for everyone, and is heavily supported by the holiday lighting community. This is serious software that can do some astounding things. If you ever have watched the Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC, xLights is usually what they are using to control those shows with hundreds of thousands of lights. It is more than powerful enough for your show at home. It runs on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. Random fact: If you’ve even seen a Tesla or group of Teslas put on a synchronized light show, xLights is the software behind that.
If you’ve ever used video editing software like Adobe Premier Pro or similar, xLights user interface will feel familiar. After setting up all of your devices in xLights, you will have created a visual model of your light show, You can import a photo of your house/yard so you can see what it’s going to look like (either in 2D or 3D). You basically have layers of “models” which each represent lights in your show (like center tree, or a snowman prop) on the Y axis and time (or a music track) across the X axis at the top. You apply effects to each of the layers for whatever time period in the software, and it will render it first on the screen then in real life by controlling the physical lights.
Here’s a 3D view of my show rendered by xLights, plus an actual video of our most popular sequence of 2025. The software will even let you move around and look at this from different angles.
“Six-Seven Christmas” RENDER from xLights“Six-Seven Christmas” in real life — our most popular sequence for 2025! You might need to turn up volume on this one.
Per their website, “xLights is a free and open source program that enables you to design, create and play amazing lighting displays through the use of DMX controllers, E1.31 Ethernet controllers and more” . What does this mean to you? It means that xLights can control a whole bunch of different types of lights and devices (including DMX, which is what they use for professional stage lighting, fog machines and other crazy stuff). xLights can control most consumer grade Twinkly devices natively right out of the box (this wasn’t true several years ago – you had to use 3rd party solutions to make it work).
xLights is free to download and use for everyone, and is heavily supported by the holiday lighting community. This is serious software that can do some astounding things. If you ever have watched the Great Christmas Light Fight on ABC, xLights is usually what they are using to control those shows with hundreds of thousands of lights. It is more than powerful enough for your show at home. It runs on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. Random fact: If you’ve even seen a Tesla or group of Teslas put on a synchronized light show, xLights is the software behind that.
If you’ve ever used video editing software like Adobe Premier Pro or similar, xLights user interface will feel familiar. After setting up all of your devices in xLights, you will have created a visual model of your light show, You can import a photo of your house/yard so you can see what it’s going to look like (either in 2D or 3D). You basically have layers of “models” which each represent lights in your show (like center tree, or a snowman prop) on the Y axis and time (or a music track) across the X axis at the top. You apply effects to each of the the layers for whatever time period in the software, and it will render it first on the screen then in real life by controlling the physical lights.
