@rey keep the white if you do as the colour mixing on mine's not as good. They also dim quite well using PWM (using mosfets attached to the microcontroller) to switch the 12V.

@geekylou good ideas...! currently i've just soldered a powerpole connector onto the end of it and have it running into a 12V bench supply, but this too can be improved

@geekylou @rey There's also the option for individually controllable LEDs, like the Adafruit NeoPixels - https://www.adafruit.com/category/168 . In my humble opinion, music-controlled lighting is awesome. Still reworking my lighting controller to handle things other than the GE ColorEffects lights (refresh rate/LED count independence, plus Windows support and unit tests)...