Christmas lights for this year: 4 pillars powered by Arduinos running FastLED.
I plan to have my lights synced to music for next year. It’s been a great learning experience for me, getting these lights working!
Well done! I imagine those strips cost you a pretty penny, but they’re very effective on the pillars.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 Thanks 
I’m using cheap and nasty UCS1903 strips. The four strips (5m each) cost around $120 AUD for the lot, including waterproof tubing.
I’d like to upgrade to some 60 LED/m strips (APA102 would be the dream), but they’re considerably more expensive!
My 2 cents on music:
Doing music synchronization on paper always sounds like a great idea. It’s a development challenge and one that will give a a pretty good sense of accomplishment. However, unless you’re doing some sort of scheduled ‘show’, you’ll start to notice a few things.
First, even if you spend a dozen hours or more syncing tracks, you’re only gonna end up having a handful of songs and those are gonna get old REAL fast. Remember those little boxes you could plug your tree lights into and they flashed to the music? How long before you killed the sound and then the flashing all together?
Second, are you going to play the music through outdoor speakers or via FM transmitter? The former sets you up for neighbor complaints and the music repetition I mentioned earlier. The latter is more ideal, but unless passers-by know to tune their radios and stay a while, they’re just gonna see otherwise randomly animated lights.
Again, this is just my opinion, but I think for a more elegant display, not beholding to music is the better idea.
great effect is this away of reseting the code with out using the reset power supply option as gonna run this from power supply for my other lights thanks keep up the great work
Know about xLights/Nutcracker? It seems rather complete as a light sequence tool.
Stumbled upon it yesterday when looking for network based controller software inspired by https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Flaschen_Taschen.
https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Flaschen_Taschen
Thanks for the feedback @Christopher_Kirkman1 . I have similar thoughts to you on everything you said. My plan is for the display to be primarily “musicless”. I will have a series of sequences on loop (perhaps selected randomly) that will play for most of the time. Then, I will schedule songs (perhaps one per night, or even one per weekend). I’ll be able to schedule them for immediate playback if need be as well.
As for playback, my thinking was to use both an FM transmitter and have speakers playing the music softly, so that people without radios could hear it. Since songs would play rarely, I don’t think that would annoy the neighbours too much.
Thanks @dave_windsor , it’s quite simple to make the animations loop. The trick is keeping the animations in sync over a long period of time. The best way to do this is to drive all strips from a single controller. That way, the strips will always be in sync.
Unfortunately, I can’t do this, as my strips are too far away and the signal degrades too much.
Thanks for the suggestion @Mikkel_Kirkgaard_Nie . I’ve had xLights recommended to me by a few people, I think it’s widely used for this kind of thing. I want to create my own software purely for the fun of it, which is why I’m not opting for a preexisting solution.