Upgrading from Visibox 5

Your Projects open unchanged. Nothing needs converting and nothing needs re-doing.

What changed is the app around them. This page is for finding the thing you cannot find: what moved, what is called something else now, and what is gone.

For what is new rather than different, see What’s New in 6.0 on the home page.

Things that are called something else

Four Clip and Song settings were sentence fragments that only made sense once you read the value beside them. They are now noun phrases that name the thing they set.

Visibox 5	Visibox 6	Where
When Clip Ends	End Action	Clip
When Retriggered	Retrigger Action	Clip
When Resuming	Resume Action	Clip
When Audio Ends	Audio End Action	Song

The values inside them did not change. Loop is still Loop, Restart is still Restart.

Three more, elsewhere:

Visibox 5	Visibox 6
Placeholder Clip	Color Clip
Video Wall Stretch	Video Wall Controller Compensation
Background Options	Edit Background…, which now opens the same editor panel every other Clip uses

Things that moved

The menu bar caught up with the right-click menus

In Visibox 5 the Song menu in the menu bar showed far less than the same menu you got by right-clicking, so whole capabilities were reachable only by right-clicking. That is fixed.

The Song menu now also carries Add Audio Clip…, Add Camera Clip, Add Visualizer Clip, Add Color Clip, Mute Audio, Audio End Action, Poly Mode and Program Identifier.

The Clip menu takes the opposite approach. It handles the Clip itself, and each of its playback settings is set in one place: the panel behind Edit Clip….

Edit Song… and Edit Clip… now lead their menus instead of sitting in the middle. They are still the way to everything a menu cannot draw: the sliders, the color picker, and the Filters and Effects editors.

Settings were rebuilt

Settings is now nine categories in one window. The MIDI Map and Remote Pairing are categories inside it rather than windows of their own. See Settings.

Output Window Size no longer sets the resolution

In Visibox 5, resizing the Output window resized the picture Visibox rendered, which meant a small window quietly gave a recording or a network output fewer pixels than it asked for.

Now the window size is just the window size. A windowed Output renders at a fixed size and the picture is fitted into whatever window you chose, with the overhang cropped. Full screen is unchanged.

If you want to see the whole canvas in a window that is not the same shape, turn on Letterbox Output window.

Things that are gone

Built-in Stream Deck Mode. The Elgato plugin is the only way Visibox talks to a Stream Deck now. It does more than the built-in mode did, and Visibox ships with a copy so you install it from inside the app.

Worth knowing on the first day

Six changes that will not stop you, but will surprise you.

• Dropping a single audio file on a Song now asks a question. In Visibox 5 it always became the Song’s backing track. It can now also become an Audio Clip, so Visibox asks which you meant. Dropping several at once still goes straight to a backing track.
• A Clip no longer stops the others by default. That is Poly Mode, and a Song set to Mono behaves the way Visibox 5 did.
• Every Clip now has a Launch Mode. Trigger is the Visibox 5 behavior and the default, so nothing changes until you ask for it.
• Clips fire on the way down. Visibox 5 waited for you to release the mouse. Visibox 6 fires the Clip the moment you press it, which is faster under the hand and is what lets you hold a Gate Clip open from the Clip row. If you prefer the old feel, turn off Trigger Clips on Press in Settings > General.
• The Windows Plugins folder moved. Your .vbfx and .vbvs files now live in %APPDATA%\Visibox Plugins\Plugins\ instead of %LOCALAPPDATA%\Visibox\Plugins\. The old folder sat inside the install and was wiped when Visibox was uninstalled. Visibox moves what is there the first time 6.0 starts, so there is nothing for you to do unless you had a shortcut pointing at the old path.
• Dragging a Clip needs its grip now. Because the tile fires on press, dragging from the face of a Clip would play it. Hover a Clip in the Song list and a grip appears along its top edge. Drag from there to move the Clip, and drag Songs by the matching grip on their rows. Clips in the Preview Pane cannot be dragged at all while this is on.

Opening a 6.0 Project in Visibox 5

Do not, if you can help it. Visibox 5 does not know about Setlists, Overlays, Poly Mode, Launch Modes, Audio Clips or anything else 6.0 added, and saving from there loses them.

Visibox 5 will not warn you, and nothing on screen afterwards tells you what it dropped. If you need to run both versions on the same show, work on a copy of the Project.