9 ms·

ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

250 points by ushakov 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Imagine how much more awesome these visualizations could be if music files came with more than 2 channels. I'm reminded of old tracker software which had simple visualizations for each track. https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c Imagine what could have been if every instrument or voice had its own channel...
- rektide 5y ago
  interesting suggestion! given that alas consumers of the world are expected to enjoy bundled finished products, it seems semi unlikely. so perhaps this suggests a great use case for stream seperators like the one posted a couple hours ago Cassiopeia[1]. ultimately i'd love for music to be more like html- an encoring of content that the user's agent then renders as it sees fit. having individual streams, or something even more complex lije an ambisonic recording that encodes position would unlock a lot of experimentation & play. i had not considered though how useful such discreization could aid in visualization, which right if the curf sounds very promising. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966795 https://www.lalal.ai/blog/meet-lalal-ai-cassiopeia-a-milestone-in-music-source-separation/ https://www.lalal.ai/blog/meet-lalal-ai-cassiopeia-a-milesto...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > ultimately i'd love for music to be more like html- an encoring of content that the user's agent then renders as it sees fit. Yeah, that would be so nice. Imagine the cool stuff people would be able to do. Disable voice tracks for instrumental versions. Play video games that perfectly synchronize to the music. Make custom visualizers for each song featuring graphics perfectly synchronized to each instrument... I always try to imagine these visualizations when I listen, even something as simple as lines being drawn in accordance to note pitch would be awesome. Pretty much impossible to do that when every sound is mixed together...
    - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
      Something like this could be done with a format like WavPack [0] I imagine. The Two Big Ears "spatial audio" format is just a repackaged WavPack file, after all, and that handles 10 channels of simultaneous audio playback even in streaming environments, and its interface is low-latency enough to perform real-time panning and spatialization processing based on listener position, i.e., for VR environments. [0] https://www.wavpack.com/ https://www.wavpack.com/
    - mrandish 5y ago
      Indeed! I produce music for fun using virtual synths, multi-layer sound libraries, audio plug-ins and MIDI combined in a software digital audio workstation (Cubase at the moment). I find it super enjoyable and despite not formally studying music, not reading traditional music notation nor being able to play any musical instrument well in real-time, through step recording to a MIDI multitrack timeline (and subsequent on-screen tweaking) I manage to create remarkably pleasing, quite commercial-sounding original music. As an equally enthusiastic video hobbyist, I've long-wanted to create my own original visuals to accompany my music. Yet the "visual synthesis" tools I've played with seem to remain split into two extremes - essentially "too algorithmic / Geiss-like" on one end and "too complex and art-talent-thirsty" on the other (for example Blender 3D, AfterEffects). A similar gap existed in music tools 20 years ago but remarkable progress has been made in closing that gap empowering in-betweeners like me to achieve wonderful results with only hobby-level skills, time and budgets. Sadly, that stunning progress in democratizing music synthesis has not been equally mirrored in the visual synthesis domain. The visual side mostly remains polarized into DJ/VJ-centric real-time apps and pro-level video editing and 2D/3D rendering tools. It's odd because the musical synthesis domain seems to have been unleashed by increasing access to dedicated hardware DSPs in the 90s followed by rapid, iterative 'software-ization' as general-purpose processors became capable of replacing DSPs (MMX etc). GPUs have followed a similar march down the curve of democratization but for some reason broad access hasn't unleashed a similar hobby renaissance on the visual synthesis side like it has for visual capture and editing with mobile/DSLR imaging and desktop video editing. However, I still remain hopeful that perhaps the visual end of the digital synthesis revolution has only been delayed. I find encouraging signs in the real-time rendering and compositing capabilities of GPUs driven by game engines from the nascent efforts of Machinema a decade ago to, more recently, ILM using Unreal Engine to create remarkable visuals for the Disney/Star Wars series "The Mandalorian" using conceptually approachable live projection mapping techniques. The custom code ILM paid Unreal to add has since been bundled (unsupported) into all versions of the engine including the personal/hobby-use ones and garage experiments can already be found on YouTube. As for providing more useful audio sources as input to the visual pipeline, there are millions of desktop music hobbyists ranging from Garagebanders on tablets and phones to DAW users on desktop. All of them are already capable of supplying separated, uncompressed multi-track audio stems (pre or post downstream effects like EQ/reverb) along with expressive metadata in the form of MIDI 2 notes and articulations. There are even a variety of standards across Windows, Mac, iOS and Android for real-time, multi-track transfer between applications within a device. For distribution formats, new consumer digital digital audio interfaces from HDMI 2.x on the interconnect side to lossless multi- and N-channel spatial audio standards on the encoding side are democratizing the necessary I/O capabilities.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    that's what MIDI is, isn't it? basically, it's digital sheet music and you can tell MIDI players to play it however you like.
chmod775 5y ago
The demo video is a bit buried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSam8zwSFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSam8zwSFw
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Man this has come a long way since GEISS.EXE for MSDOS+VGA (320x200x256)... it didn't even synchronize, but it was 1988 and I was so stoned that it appeared to be in sync. Really cool stuff. I saw Jon Hopkins in concern a few years ago and his visualization was killer. Wonder if he used this.
glotzerhotze 5y ago
YES. I had to look twice to be sure this is the same project we used 20 years ago to throw visuals on a wall while having awesome parties! Back in the days I routed the audio from the dj-mixer into winamp to get this to work. Fun times! Thank you so much for those memories and big thumbs up for the maintainers of the project!
colordrops 5y ago
I've loved playing with this over the years - it's a great project. I've been to a couple music shows where the VJ had a serious setup with what looked like physical mixers with buttons, knobs, and dials, and some quite complex software going. Does anyone know how to learn about the state of the art in VJing?
- CoolestBeans 5y ago
  Not sure about “state of the art” but if you’re on Mac, VDMX (https://vidvox.net/ https://vidvox.net/) is a good place to start looking. Its sort of like a DJ mixer for video sources but lets you do other things like control parameters of your video sources with a MIDI contoller for example.
  - grepfru_it 5y ago
    Back in the day there was MilkyMist (https://m-labs.hk/gateware/m1/ https://m-labs.hk/gateware/m1/) I am extremely heart broken I never bought one before it was discontinued (the software and hardware is open source tho)
  - mxxx 5y ago
    +1 for VDMX. When you understand the fundamentals of how to build stuff with it you can almost create your own version of most of the other software available on the market. Plus the vidvox dudes are legends.
- ruined 5y ago
  if you want to get into hacking on a real ntsc/pal signal there is a whole universe of very expensive eurorack gear. on the low end you could check out ch/av for a VGA synth. you probably want something a bit higher level. for a simple raspi-based device that lets you play with video feedback and has midi-tuneable features check out video_waaaves and other software by andrei jay. combined with a basic edirol video mixer and a couple sources this could get you pretty far. for coding visuals, learn glsl on shadertoy, p5.js and threejs from streamers like yuri artyukh, and check out what people are doing with commercial software like touchdesigner or max/msp
kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
From time to time I run projectM on songs I like. It's designed to be an open-source implementation of the Milkdrop visualizer (I think), so it also runs on Linux unlike WinAmp/Milkdrop. Its visualizations are very psychedelic and mesmerizing. It is very entertaining and I highly recommend giving it a try. You can download extra presets or use the ones that come with it. It's also worth noting that I had to adjust (increase) the beat sensitivity and fiddle with the audio output settings to get it to work on Linux. It also works better for faster-paced songs IMO.
01100011 5y ago
Everytime I've tried to run this it ends up crashing and being utterly unusable on Linux. I've been trying for about 15 years on different hardware. Nowadays I just use a webgl based visualizer.
- laumars 5y ago
  Works fine for me on Linux. I’ve had it running for hours on end without a crash. Some builds are more stable than others. I think I’ve found the SDL build to be the best. The ALSA one was fine bar a few specific plugins that needed disabling but the SDL build on ArchLinux is rock solid.
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  I've played live gigs with Project M projecting on a backdrop behind the band. I ran the visuals from my linux laptop which also doubled as my synth. TL;DR: whatchutalkinboutwillis?
  - danielheath 5y ago
    I’ve had segfaults while rendering a variety of presets ; disabling them seems to fix it.
  - oscarcp 5y ago
    I have issues as well, each implementation (SDL/Jack/Pulse) is completely different, in some the shaders break completely, some don't respond to shortcuts or don't show the menus... it's a mess and the funny thing is that these are the same issues I had 10 years ago. The first thing that they have to fix is that each client works the same way.
- Zababa 5y ago
  What webgl visualizer do you use? I have trouble with ProjectM too.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    https://butterchurnviz.com/ https://butterchurnviz.com/
grepfru_it 5y ago
There is also an android port of this app. It is pay to play but you can easily copy over presets from the original source and aftermarket presets. I run it on my android headunit which brings back the nostalgia of 90s aftermarket stereos with a simple visualization that plays on loop (except this one is interactive and fills a 9" touch screen :D)
mediocregopher 5y ago
Not to be confused with the community-loved but hated-by-nintendo mod of smash brawl, Project M: https://pmunofficial.com/ https://pmunofficial.com/
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > hated-by-nintendo Always surprises me just how out of touch this company is. Just finished reading that huge Twitter thread. That's just so sad.
  - laumars 5y ago
    Which huge Twitter thread?
    - mediocregopher 5y ago
      See the latest post on https://pmunofficial.com/en/ https://pmunofficial.com/en/
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srfu4r https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srfu4r
  - Stampo00 5y ago
    I mean, people may disagree with these moves by Nintendo and this position may be short sighted, maybe not. But regardless, it's Nintendo's intellectual property to do with as they please. They certainly don't owe fans or customers anything.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      If they don't want people to play their games, who am I to argue? The article taught me people actually need Nintendo's permission to host a tournament. They might get C&D'd otherwise. What an insane world we live in. I can't fathom why anyone would ever C&D an event involving their own game and its enthusiastic fans. Intellectual property shouldn't even exist in the first place, let alone be used to extort $50k from fans who are basically advertising their game for free, making it popular and driving a lot of sales. They're the ones who owe Nintendo nothing, yet they remained loyal despite this mistreatment.
audunw 5y ago
Music visualization is really underdeveloped in my opinion. I've never seen anything I find impressive. The problem is it never really looks very much like the visualization relates to the music I'm listening too. Usually you just kind of see the rythm of the music at most. I want to see something where harmonies look like beautiful patterns, noise looks like noise , and perhaps you could even pick out individual instruments in the visualization. It's really difficult though, which I guess is why it hasn't been done. You need to re-implement much of human audio perception, and then map that to a visual language.
- Guillaume86 5y ago
  I think it's a problem similar to maps in rythm games (thinking Beat Saber in my case), auto generated ones are never as good as manually crafted ones. If it was possible to extract the dominantly perceived beat/instrument/melody, it would probably lead to better map generation too.
- Retr0id 5y ago
  I think this is something that neural networks would be great at, I suppose the hard part is figuring out exactly what to train one for/with. As a starting point, you could separate the different instruments, which I'm pretty sure is a solved problem by now.
- ushakov 5y ago
  maybe deadmau5 would change your opinion on that? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  Most of these just work on playing loops set at certain BPMs at the lower end of actual responsiveness, to a fast fourier transform which can maybe separate out further based on frequency range, maybe just roughly from bass/mid/treble, further mapped to rendering (Like here in projectm, which as I recall is just a fork of milkdrop). There was some really cool research I found recently which I think I'm linking here if I'm not mistaken: https://ciphrd.com/2019/09/01/audio-analysis-for-advanced-music-visualization-pt-1/ https://ciphrd.com/2019/09/01/audio-analysis-for-advanced-mu... They've gone and tweaked the basic formula from just FFT to something that actually does "peak detection", which is better explained in that article than I can here as it involves a lot of math. There's some ideas out there to be sure. YEARS ago (so it looks kind of fuzzy now) I remember this guy hacked together some synths he programmed with visuals generated for them, it's really psychedelic stuff: https://vimeo.com/3288925 https://vimeo.com/3288925 I actually talked to the person who made this and they said this took like 9 hours to render. So not exactly real-time stuff back then, might be now. The coolest stuff these days is in 3D and projection mapped. https://vimeo.com/485066000 https://vimeo.com/485066000
tytrdev 5y ago
Thought maybe rollback was coming for ProjectM players for a second ={
xook 5y ago
> projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop I thought these visuals looked familiar. At first I thought it might have been based on a library used by MD, but this is much better news.
Ceyarrecks 5y ago
while it looks seemingly pretty, it is stated as ONLY working on win os X. Keep it.
- laumars 5y ago
  The linked page lists more than that ;) What OS are you after? It officially supports Windows, macOS and Linux. But I do know of FreeBSD, iOS and Android ports too. There’s bound to be more ports out there as well.
- bwooster 5y ago
  libprojectM is a cross-platform library designed to be part of other applications. There are some reference implementations using SDL and Qt. They run on Linux. For best results grab the latest master and build with cmake.
the_gipsy 5y ago
It would be cool if it could “peek forward” to “build up” some visualizations.
dtgriscom 5y ago
I watched the demo video, and couldn't convince myself that the images had anything to do with the accompanying music. Cool animations, but not a "music visualizer."
- bwooster 5y ago
  Almost all of the visualizations are responsive to the bass/mid/treb amplitudes and detected beat, but the problem on the SDL version on macOS is latency, which is unfortunately present in the demo video you are likely referring to. SDL doesn't currently allow for requesting low-latency audio capture so we're looking at PortAudio instead.
h2odragon 5y ago
just to throw out a blast from the past: https://github.com/djandruczyk/eXtace https://github.com/djandruczyk/eXtace
chungy 5y ago
Can someone give the quick tutorial on how to load music files into the thing? I installed projectm-sdl on Arch, it doesn't seem to do anything when I pass a file name to the program, keyboard mashing seems to do nothing, and dragging-and-dropping from a file manager seems to do nothing.
- tristanc 5y ago
  You have to make sure to either feed it a microphone input or research how to set up a loopback monitor with pulsaaudio/pipewire/alsa (whichever you use). This way you can feed it whatever the audio output from any application. Then you many also need to specify an environment variable in your shell (I think it’s something like SDL_AUDIODRIVER I’m not sure and you set it to the specific driver you’re using) in any case you should be able to find instruction with “pulseaudio loopback stereo monitor sdl” (Apologies for formatting i am on mobile) I recently had to set this up on a raspberry pi 4 with manjaro / KDE plasma and it was a bit of a pain to setup (the setup is slightly different depending on your exact audio configuration) but it’s very rewarding once you do. Feel free to PM as I spent a lot of time debugging the setup and may be able to help!
  - chungy 5y ago
    Thanks, that wasn't at all obvious... I had to figure out also how to get audio to redirect in Pipewire, but now I can actually see the output. I suppose this thing would probably be more useful as an ffmpeg filter and/or audiacious plugin.
    - tristanc 5y ago
      This is a fantastic idea! I forked [1] projectM a while back to work on a few modifications such as screen and audio recording (by saving raw framebuffers) and being able to select the active preset remotely from a web interface so I became somewhat familiar with the way projectm handles A/V input/output. I just took a look at ffmpeg’s video filter interface and it looks like linking the two could be doable! This feels like a much more elegant solution for recording frame-perfect captures so thank you! I’ll definitely be looking more into it. [1] https://github.com/hashFactory/projectm https://github.com/hashFactory/projectm
Stampo00 5y ago
Oh, wow. What a nostalgia trip. Milkdrop was my jam around the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm glad it's not forgotten.
sytelus 5y ago
This gives me idea: Train GAN from music videos and then generate music videos!
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Brilliant, now we can have tasteless music videos made by AI
93po 5y ago
Funny to see this here. Just bought the premium Android app bc I really like it when high
bwooster 5y ago
There have been a good number of major improvements in projectM in the last few years, which is impressive considering the age of this project. Trying to keep software and user-contributed presets and shaders from 20 years ago working are efforts that are never finished. To mention a few: * Milkdrop was a windows-only win32 affair, and the shaders for presets have all been written using HLSL, for DirectX. ProjectM had to incorporate a shader transpiler to convert preset shader code on the fly from HLSL to GLSL so that projectM can run on platforms other than windows. The conversion isn't perfect and can cause a few shaders to fail compilation but these problems do get fixed when someone takes the time to dig into them. * Improving the FFT maths and PCM data interface * Optimizations for preset evaluation using the LLVM JIT * Halfway-completed port to the web with Emscripten * Updated support to work first with more recent versions of iTunes as a plugin and more recently as a Music.app plugin. macOS installer for the plugin and SDL app. Almost-working multi-bundle installer code signing and notarization. * Text menus and preset searching in the SDL app (keys listed in README) * Released as a standalone app for Steam * The build system was ported from a very-broken CMake setup to autotools, and then back to CMake again, soon to be released as a new major version 4.0.0. There's a discord now too. https://discord.gg/tpEuywB https://discord.gg/tpEuywB We welcome PRs and generally respond quickly to them. It's a completely community-driven project and we're always looking for help.
- ushakov 5y ago
  hey Mischa, thanks a lot for commenting on the thread! i’ve actually found your GitHub profile when i was searching for a domain name i tried mish.dev and your GitHub came up, so i checked it out and was really impressed of projectM, so i bookmarked it eventually i’ve got my own domain (mish.co) and yesterday found the bookmark again and decided to share it here! the rest is history :)
unixhero 5y ago
Did they get the dancing bear (winamp plugin) to work?

250 points by ushakov 5y ago

Imagine how much more awesome these visualizations could be if music files came with more than 2 channels. I'm reminded of old tracker software which had simple visualizations for each track. https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c https://youtu.be/eclMFa0mD1c Imagine what could have been if every instrument or voice had its own channel...

rektide 5y ago
interesting suggestion! given that alas consumers of the world are expected to enjoy bundled finished products, it seems semi unlikely. so perhaps this suggests a great use case for stream seperators like the one posted a couple hours ago Cassiopeia[1]. ultimately i'd love for music to be more like html- an encoring of content that the user's agent then renders as it sees fit. having individual streams, or something even more complex lije an ambisonic recording that encodes position would unlock a lot of experimentation & play. i had not considered though how useful such discreization could aid in visualization, which right if the curf sounds very promising. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966795 https://www.lalal.ai/blog/meet-lalal-ai-cassiopeia-a-milestone-in-music-source-separation/ https://www.lalal.ai/blog/meet-lalal-ai-cassiopeia-a-milesto...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > ultimately i'd love for music to be more like html- an encoring of content that the user's agent then renders as it sees fit. Yeah, that would be so nice. Imagine the cool stuff people would be able to do. Disable voice tracks for instrumental versions. Play video games that perfectly synchronize to the music. Make custom visualizers for each song featuring graphics perfectly synchronized to each instrument... I always try to imagine these visualizations when I listen, even something as simple as lines being drawn in accordance to note pitch would be awesome. Pretty much impossible to do that when every sound is mixed together...
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    Something like this could be done with a format like WavPack [0] I imagine. The Two Big Ears "spatial audio" format is just a repackaged WavPack file, after all, and that handles 10 channels of simultaneous audio playback even in streaming environments, and its interface is low-latency enough to perform real-time panning and spatialization processing based on listener position, i.e., for VR environments. [0] https://www.wavpack.com/ https://www.wavpack.com/
  - mrandish 5y ago
    Indeed! I produce music for fun using virtual synths, multi-layer sound libraries, audio plug-ins and MIDI combined in a software digital audio workstation (Cubase at the moment). I find it super enjoyable and despite not formally studying music, not reading traditional music notation nor being able to play any musical instrument well in real-time, through step recording to a MIDI multitrack timeline (and subsequent on-screen tweaking) I manage to create remarkably pleasing, quite commercial-sounding original music. As an equally enthusiastic video hobbyist, I've long-wanted to create my own original visuals to accompany my music. Yet the "visual synthesis" tools I've played with seem to remain split into two extremes - essentially "too algorithmic / Geiss-like" on one end and "too complex and art-talent-thirsty" on the other (for example Blender 3D, AfterEffects). A similar gap existed in music tools 20 years ago but remarkable progress has been made in closing that gap empowering in-betweeners like me to achieve wonderful results with only hobby-level skills, time and budgets. Sadly, that stunning progress in democratizing music synthesis has not been equally mirrored in the visual synthesis domain. The visual side mostly remains polarized into DJ/VJ-centric real-time apps and pro-level video editing and 2D/3D rendering tools. It's odd because the musical synthesis domain seems to have been unleashed by increasing access to dedicated hardware DSPs in the 90s followed by rapid, iterative 'software-ization' as general-purpose processors became capable of replacing DSPs (MMX etc). GPUs have followed a similar march down the curve of democratization but for some reason broad access hasn't unleashed a similar hobby renaissance on the visual synthesis side like it has for visual capture and editing with mobile/DSLR imaging and desktop video editing. However, I still remain hopeful that perhaps the visual end of the digital synthesis revolution has only been delayed. I find encouraging signs in the real-time rendering and compositing capabilities of GPUs driven by game engines from the nascent efforts of Machinema a decade ago to, more recently, ILM using Unreal Engine to create remarkable visuals for the Disney/Star Wars series "The Mandalorian" using conceptually approachable live projection mapping techniques. The custom code ILM paid Unreal to add has since been bundled (unsupported) into all versions of the engine including the personal/hobby-use ones and garage experiments can already be found on YouTube. As for providing more useful audio sources as input to the visual pipeline, there are millions of desktop music hobbyists ranging from Garagebanders on tablets and phones to DAW users on desktop. All of them are already capable of supplying separated, uncompressed multi-track audio stems (pre or post downstream effects like EQ/reverb) along with expressive metadata in the form of MIDI 2 notes and articulations. There are even a variety of standards across Windows, Mac, iOS and Android for real-time, multi-track transfer between applications within a device. For distribution formats, new consumer digital digital audio interfaces from HDMI 2.x on the interconnect side to lossless multi- and N-channel spatial audio standards on the encoding side are democratizing the necessary I/O capabilities.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  that's what MIDI is, isn't it? basically, it's digital sheet music and you can tell MIDI players to play it however you like.

chmod775 5y ago

The demo video is a bit buried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSam8zwSFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSam8zwSFw

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Man this has come a long way since GEISS.EXE for MSDOS+VGA (320x200x256)... it didn't even synchronize, but it was 1988 and I was so stoned that it appeared to be in sync. Really cool stuff. I saw Jon Hopkins in concern a few years ago and his visualization was killer. Wonder if he used this.

glotzerhotze 5y ago

YES. I had to look twice to be sure this is the same project we used 20 years ago to throw visuals on a wall while having awesome parties! Back in the days I routed the audio from the dj-mixer into winamp to get this to work. Fun times! Thank you so much for those memories and big thumbs up for the maintainers of the project!

colordrops 5y ago

I've loved playing with this over the years - it's a great project. I've been to a couple music shows where the VJ had a serious setup with what looked like physical mixers with buttons, knobs, and dials, and some quite complex software going. Does anyone know how to learn about the state of the art in VJing?

CoolestBeans 5y ago
Not sure about “state of the art” but if you’re on Mac, VDMX (https://vidvox.net/ https://vidvox.net/) is a good place to start looking. Its sort of like a DJ mixer for video sources but lets you do other things like control parameters of your video sources with a MIDI contoller for example.
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  Back in the day there was MilkyMist (https://m-labs.hk/gateware/m1/ https://m-labs.hk/gateware/m1/) I am extremely heart broken I never bought one before it was discontinued (the software and hardware is open source tho)
- mxxx 5y ago
  +1 for VDMX. When you understand the fundamentals of how to build stuff with it you can almost create your own version of most of the other software available on the market. Plus the vidvox dudes are legends.
ruined 5y ago
if you want to get into hacking on a real ntsc/pal signal there is a whole universe of very expensive eurorack gear. on the low end you could check out ch/av for a VGA synth. you probably want something a bit higher level. for a simple raspi-based device that lets you play with video feedback and has midi-tuneable features check out video_waaaves and other software by andrei jay. combined with a basic edirol video mixer and a couple sources this could get you pretty far. for coding visuals, learn glsl on shadertoy, p5.js and threejs from streamers like yuri artyukh, and check out what people are doing with commercial software like touchdesigner or max/msp

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago

From time to time I run projectM on songs I like. It's designed to be an open-source implementation of the Milkdrop visualizer (I think), so it also runs on Linux unlike WinAmp/Milkdrop. Its visualizations are very psychedelic and mesmerizing. It is very entertaining and I highly recommend giving it a try. You can download extra presets or use the ones that come with it. It's also worth noting that I had to adjust (increase) the beat sensitivity and fiddle with the audio output settings to get it to work on Linux. It also works better for faster-paced songs IMO.

01100011 5y ago

Everytime I've tried to run this it ends up crashing and being utterly unusable on Linux. I've been trying for about 15 years on different hardware. Nowadays I just use a webgl based visualizer.

laumars 5y ago
Works fine for me on Linux. I’ve had it running for hours on end without a crash. Some builds are more stable than others. I think I’ve found the SDL build to be the best. The ALSA one was fine bar a few specific plugins that needed disabling but the SDL build on ArchLinux is rock solid.
grepfru_it 5y ago
I've played live gigs with Project M projecting on a backdrop behind the band. I ran the visuals from my linux laptop which also doubled as my synth. TL;DR: whatchutalkinboutwillis?
- danielheath 5y ago
  I’ve had segfaults while rendering a variety of presets ; disabling them seems to fix it.
- oscarcp 5y ago
  I have issues as well, each implementation (SDL/Jack/Pulse) is completely different, in some the shaders break completely, some don't respond to shortcuts or don't show the menus... it's a mess and the funny thing is that these are the same issues I had 10 years ago. The first thing that they have to fix is that each client works the same way.
Zababa 5y ago
What webgl visualizer do you use? I have trouble with ProjectM too.
- 01100011 5y ago
  https://butterchurnviz.com/ https://butterchurnviz.com/

grepfru_it 5y ago

There is also an android port of this app. It is pay to play but you can easily copy over presets from the original source and aftermarket presets. I run it on my android headunit which brings back the nostalgia of 90s aftermarket stereos with a simple visualization that plays on loop (except this one is interactive and fills a 9" touch screen :D)

mediocregopher 5y ago

Not to be confused with the community-loved but hated-by-nintendo mod of smash brawl, Project M: https://pmunofficial.com/ https://pmunofficial.com/

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> hated-by-nintendo Always surprises me just how out of touch this company is. Just finished reading that huge Twitter thread. That's just so sad.
- laumars 5y ago
  Which huge Twitter thread?
  - mediocregopher 5y ago
    See the latest post on https://pmunofficial.com/en/ https://pmunofficial.com/en/
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srfu4r https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srfu4r
- Stampo00 5y ago
  I mean, people may disagree with these moves by Nintendo and this position may be short sighted, maybe not. But regardless, it's Nintendo's intellectual property to do with as they please. They certainly don't owe fans or customers anything.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    If they don't want people to play their games, who am I to argue? The article taught me people actually need Nintendo's permission to host a tournament. They might get C&D'd otherwise. What an insane world we live in. I can't fathom why anyone would ever C&D an event involving their own game and its enthusiastic fans. Intellectual property shouldn't even exist in the first place, let alone be used to extort $50k from fans who are basically advertising their game for free, making it popular and driving a lot of sales. They're the ones who owe Nintendo nothing, yet they remained loyal despite this mistreatment.

audunw 5y ago

Music visualization is really underdeveloped in my opinion. I've never seen anything I find impressive. The problem is it never really looks very much like the visualization relates to the music I'm listening too. Usually you just kind of see the rythm of the music at most. I want to see something where harmonies look like beautiful patterns, noise looks like noise , and perhaps you could even pick out individual instruments in the visualization. It's really difficult though, which I guess is why it hasn't been done. You need to re-implement much of human audio perception, and then map that to a visual language.

Guillaume86 5y ago
I think it's a problem similar to maps in rythm games (thinking Beat Saber in my case), auto generated ones are never as good as manually crafted ones. If it was possible to extract the dominantly perceived beat/instrument/melody, it would probably lead to better map generation too.
Retr0id 5y ago
I think this is something that neural networks would be great at, I suppose the hard part is figuring out exactly what to train one for/with. As a starting point, you could separate the different instruments, which I'm pretty sure is a solved problem by now.
ushakov 5y ago
maybe deadmau5 would change your opinion on that? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY
jamal-kumar 5y ago
Most of these just work on playing loops set at certain BPMs at the lower end of actual responsiveness, to a fast fourier transform which can maybe separate out further based on frequency range, maybe just roughly from bass/mid/treble, further mapped to rendering (Like here in projectm, which as I recall is just a fork of milkdrop). There was some really cool research I found recently which I think I'm linking here if I'm not mistaken: https://ciphrd.com/2019/09/01/audio-analysis-for-advanced-music-visualization-pt-1/ https://ciphrd.com/2019/09/01/audio-analysis-for-advanced-mu... They've gone and tweaked the basic formula from just FFT to something that actually does "peak detection", which is better explained in that article than I can here as it involves a lot of math. There's some ideas out there to be sure. YEARS ago (so it looks kind of fuzzy now) I remember this guy hacked together some synths he programmed with visuals generated for them, it's really psychedelic stuff: https://vimeo.com/3288925 https://vimeo.com/3288925 I actually talked to the person who made this and they said this took like 9 hours to render. So not exactly real-time stuff back then, might be now. The coolest stuff these days is in 3D and projection mapped. https://vimeo.com/485066000 https://vimeo.com/485066000

tytrdev 5y ago

Thought maybe rollback was coming for ProjectM players for a second ={

xook 5y ago

> projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop I thought these visuals looked familiar. At first I thought it might have been based on a library used by MD, but this is much better news.

Ceyarrecks 5y ago

while it looks seemingly pretty, it is stated as ONLY working on win os X. Keep it.

laumars 5y ago
The linked page lists more than that ;) What OS are you after? It officially supports Windows, macOS and Linux. But I do know of FreeBSD, iOS and Android ports too. There’s bound to be more ports out there as well.
bwooster 5y ago
libprojectM is a cross-platform library designed to be part of other applications. There are some reference implementations using SDL and Qt. They run on Linux. For best results grab the latest master and build with cmake.

the_gipsy 5y ago

It would be cool if it could “peek forward” to “build up” some visualizations.

dtgriscom 5y ago

I watched the demo video, and couldn't convince myself that the images had anything to do with the accompanying music. Cool animations, but not a "music visualizer."

bwooster 5y ago
Almost all of the visualizations are responsive to the bass/mid/treb amplitudes and detected beat, but the problem on the SDL version on macOS is latency, which is unfortunately present in the demo video you are likely referring to. SDL doesn't currently allow for requesting low-latency audio capture so we're looking at PortAudio instead.

h2odragon 5y ago

just to throw out a blast from the past: https://github.com/djandruczyk/eXtace https://github.com/djandruczyk/eXtace

chungy 5y ago

Can someone give the quick tutorial on how to load music files into the thing? I installed projectm-sdl on Arch, it doesn't seem to do anything when I pass a file name to the program, keyboard mashing seems to do nothing, and dragging-and-dropping from a file manager seems to do nothing.

tristanc 5y ago
You have to make sure to either feed it a microphone input or research how to set up a loopback monitor with pulsaaudio/pipewire/alsa (whichever you use). This way you can feed it whatever the audio output from any application. Then you many also need to specify an environment variable in your shell (I think it’s something like SDL_AUDIODRIVER I’m not sure and you set it to the specific driver you’re using) in any case you should be able to find instruction with “pulseaudio loopback stereo monitor sdl” (Apologies for formatting i am on mobile) I recently had to set this up on a raspberry pi 4 with manjaro / KDE plasma and it was a bit of a pain to setup (the setup is slightly different depending on your exact audio configuration) but it’s very rewarding once you do. Feel free to PM as I spent a lot of time debugging the setup and may be able to help!
- chungy 5y ago
  Thanks, that wasn't at all obvious... I had to figure out also how to get audio to redirect in Pipewire, but now I can actually see the output. I suppose this thing would probably be more useful as an ffmpeg filter and/or audiacious plugin.
  - tristanc 5y ago
    This is a fantastic idea! I forked [1] projectM a while back to work on a few modifications such as screen and audio recording (by saving raw framebuffers) and being able to select the active preset remotely from a web interface so I became somewhat familiar with the way projectm handles A/V input/output. I just took a look at ffmpeg’s video filter interface and it looks like linking the two could be doable! This feels like a much more elegant solution for recording frame-perfect captures so thank you! I’ll definitely be looking more into it. [1] https://github.com/hashFactory/projectm https://github.com/hashFactory/projectm

Stampo00 5y ago

Oh, wow. What a nostalgia trip. Milkdrop was my jam around the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm glad it's not forgotten.

sytelus 5y ago

This gives me idea: Train GAN from music videos and then generate music videos!

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Brilliant, now we can have tasteless music videos made by AI

93po 5y ago

Funny to see this here. Just bought the premium Android app bc I really like it when high

bwooster 5y ago

There have been a good number of major improvements in projectM in the last few years, which is impressive considering the age of this project. Trying to keep software and user-contributed presets and shaders from 20 years ago working are efforts that are never finished. To mention a few: * Milkdrop was a windows-only win32 affair, and the shaders for presets have all been written using HLSL, for DirectX. ProjectM had to incorporate a shader transpiler to convert preset shader code on the fly from HLSL to GLSL so that projectM can run on platforms other than windows. The conversion isn't perfect and can cause a few shaders to fail compilation but these problems do get fixed when someone takes the time to dig into them. * Improving the FFT maths and PCM data interface * Optimizations for preset evaluation using the LLVM JIT * Halfway-completed port to the web with Emscripten * Updated support to work first with more recent versions of iTunes as a plugin and more recently as a Music.app plugin. macOS installer for the plugin and SDL app. Almost-working multi-bundle installer code signing and notarization. * Text menus and preset searching in the SDL app (keys listed in README) * Released as a standalone app for Steam * The build system was ported from a very-broken CMake setup to autotools, and then back to CMake again, soon to be released as a new major version 4.0.0. There's a discord now too. https://discord.gg/tpEuywB https://discord.gg/tpEuywB We welcome PRs and generally respond quickly to them. It's a completely community-driven project and we're always looking for help.

ushakov 5y ago
hey Mischa, thanks a lot for commenting on the thread! i’ve actually found your GitHub profile when i was searching for a domain name i tried mish.dev and your GitHub came up, so i checked it out and was really impressed of projectM, so i bookmarked it eventually i’ve got my own domain (mish.co) and yesterday found the bookmark again and decided to share it here! the rest is history :)

unixhero 5y ago

Did they get the dancing bear (winamp plugin) to work?