What to use instead of Minotor

October 2026 · minotor.org

If your show depends on following MIDI clock from Ableton Live or a sequencer, Resolume Arena is the only tool on this list that does that and also sends pixels to LEDs. It costs €799. If you can live with visuals that react to the audio itself, LedFx is free and open source with a release from 4 October 2026, and Jinx! is free on Windows. WLED, firmware for an ESP32, replaces the Arduino end of the setup and works with all three. PixelController, the closest thing to Minotor in spirit, is archived.

What you are replacing

Minotor did two jobs. On the laptop it drew low-resolution animations whose timing came from MIDI clock, 24 ticks per quarter note (rhythm theory has the details), so a flash landed on the beat without anyone tapping a tempo. It then pushed the frames over USB serial to an Arduino running the team's LEDuino firmware, which drove the WS2801 pixels.

LEDuino was written for Minotor. Whatever you move to, the Arduino needs different firmware or gets swapped for a network receiver. The animation side is where the tools below differ most, because almost all of them take their tempo from the sound instead of from a clock.

The options, side by side

If your show runs on MIDI clock

Resolume takes MIDI clock in the MIDI tab of its Preferences and follows the tempo as it changes. Its manual offers two behaviours for when the clock stops: stop with it, or switch back to manual tempo. Ableton Link is the other way in. The MIDI clock article covers Avenue as well as Arena, but only Arena has DMX output, where you place fixtures over the composition and Resolume samples their colour from the video. A pixel strip or a matrix becomes a fixture on a virtual set of DMX universes Resolume calls a Lumiverse, 512 channels to a universe, sent out as Art-Net.

Resolume is also a different kind of program. It plays video clips and effects in layers, where Minotor generated each animation from code at the matrix's own resolution. You will be building content for a few hundred pixels in a tool made for full HD screens, and none of Minotor's 19 animations come with it.

Jinx! does read MIDI, and its manual mentions syncing a matrix to a sequencer such as Cubase, Logic or Pro Tools. What it maps are control changes and program changes onto eight functions, scene and chase changes, the crossfader, master brightness and strobe among them. The manual never mentions MIDI clock. You would have your DAW send a program change at the start of each section, and the effects inside a scene would run at their own speed or follow the audio.

If audio-reactive is good enough

LedFx listens to an audio input, on Windows the system output by default, and turns it into effects for strips and matrices, including 2D ones such as plasma, flame, digital rain and a 2D equaliser. It sends to WLED devices over the network and to plain E1.31, Art-Net or DDP receivers, and it can drive an Arduino over serial through the Adalight protocol. It is under active development.

Jinx! is the older free choice and the one built most like a lighting desk: four effect channels with two generators each, a scene store, a chase engine and a full-screen show mode. Its manual warns that it always renders 25 frames per second, so a serial link with too low a baud rate will skip frames. It runs only on Windows, and its last version is ten years old.

WLED on its own needs no computer at all. With a microphone or line input on the ESP32 its audio-reactive effects run on the board, and the 2D effects cover a matrix. Resolume Arena, Jinx! and LedFx can all send to it over the network.

Reusing a Minotor matrix

The team's own wall was 24 × 16 WS2801 pixels driven by an Arduino Mega 2560 (team setup). That is 384 pixels, or 1,152 channels, which is three DMX universes at 170 RGB pixels each, the figure PixelController's documentation gives.

You can keep the Arduino and flash new firmware. Jinx! can send tpm2 or the Glediator protocol over serial, PixelController ships a tpm2 serial sketch in its integration/ArduinoFw/tpm2serial folder, and LedFx sends Adalight. At 25 frames per second, 384 pixels come to 28,800 bytes a second before any protocol overhead, which is more than a 115200 baud link can carry. Pick the fastest baud rate your board and firmware agree on.

The other route is to replace the Arduino with an ESP32 running WLED, which lists the WS2801 among the chips it drives, and send it Art-Net, E1.31 or DDP over Wi-Fi or Ethernet. That also lets Resolume Arena reach the matrix, since it has no serial output of its own in the documentation we read. The 12 V pixels and the ATX supplies from the build guide stay as they are.

Or keep running Minotor

The code still builds. On a Mac it compiles against Qt 5.15 with a two-line patch from our build test, and the download page has the Linux notes. It is also the only free tool here that follows MIDI clock, and none of the others can reuse its animations. The state of the project explains what nobody has fixed since 2017.

How this page was put together

We have not run any of these tools on a matrix. Everything above comes from each project's own documentation, downloads and repository, read on 8 October 2026:

• Resolume: DMX Output (Arena only, Lumiverses, Art-Net), MIDI Shortcuts (MIDI clock), Ableton Link, and the shop for prices and demo limits
• Jinx!: live-leds.de downloads, the 2.4 program and its 62-page user manual
• LedFx: github.com/LedFx/LedFx (device and effect modules, scenes API) and docs.ledfx.app
• WLED: github.com/wled/WLED and kno.wled.ge
• PixelController: github.com/neophob/PixelController

Release dates and repository states are from the GitHub API on the same day. If something here is wrong or a tool is missing, write to hello@minotor.org.