Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah to this day I think of Winamp visualizers as still the best implementation of music visualization ecosystem to date. iTunes had (has?) visualization plugins but didn’t compare to the hey day of Winamp. Seems like people just stopped trying in this category? Not sure where the audio visualization scene is at
Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I built out a mini Spotify player with visualization support: https://github.com/dvx/lofi Even had a few folks contribute a couple of neat visualizations[1] :) PS: Visualizations were unfortunately deprecated on Macs since like 1.5.0 because of the incredible difficulty of getting the audio stream data. Pretty sure there's no way of doing it these days outside of a kext. [1] http…
Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#52You basically want to show the best possible example of it working, right out of the box, as that very first impression is what sticks.
For your demo video I'd also have it change music genres during the demo, and with each change also change the images to suit that genre. Show 10 seconds of generic rock and have the images be a concert, then switch to 10 seconds of classical music and have the images be nature/space, etc.
I think I'm one of the few who still have a large local music library and listen to it lots, usually while working on hardware projects or writing/sketching ideas, so I'd happily use something like this up on my monitor while doing so.
Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#53Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#54Does it have integration with "popular music streaming services", as nowadays it is rare for users to have their music in mp3 format.
It doesn't at the moment. I would like to, but it's quite difficult getting access to PCM audio data from services for audio analysis due to DRM (see Widevine).
Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#55Kudos for the effort. Now If you have a beast processor like M1 I presume it would run ok, but still, and this makes my 5+ year old machine cooking omelet, would never use it because of this. Also mentioned here in comments, dvx/lofi is the same story, Electron and webgl shaders, just not acceptable performance for such a tiny thing. Old school demoscene coders is where we should learn how to write efficient software…
Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#56This uses crazy amounts of resources for what it offers. Electron just isn't the right platform for such a thing, imho.
Should be a nice Rust / OCaml / C++ / "whatever native" app with max. 10% the size and 1% of the current resource usage.
Maybe it's better on other systems regarding resources but the Linux version I've tried made my laptop fan go into fighter-jet mode. That's not appropriate for playing music and showing some "shaken images". When using my desktop media player (smplayer) and projectM as visualization there is hardly any load on the same system (and the fan remains of course completely off).
I'm not sure the media player component in this project here is even needed. If the visualization needs to analyze larger parts of the audio it could delay and buffer the signal (which would work for longer running background music well enough), or just analyze the files on disk upfront and save the results externally. At least on Linux there is some generic audio player interface that shows for example a widget in the task bar (I don't know about the details how this works, but it works). Information from this interface could be used to know which track is playing currently and get notified about track changes (showing the title and cover art and offering play/stop/pause/forward/rewind buttons is what the generic audio player widget can do so the needed information about player state is available and can be obtained likely also form other apps). I would guess such an audio player interface is also there on other desktop operating systems so such a visualization could be made cross platform likely.
Just my 2¢.
Re: Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos
#57The demo here is underwhelming compared to old-school winamp visualizers. But I think that with deep learning, there is now a real opportunity to make a kickass visualizer. Take a GAN and set the latent vector according to the DFT of the audio stream -- it would be super trippy. You could even use WaveNet and CLIP to make the visuals match the lyrics.
Yeah, I can understand that. I had a lot of fun listening to music in winamp when I was younger with milkdrop. But I think my tastes have changed now to where I prefer visualizations with more concrete imagery and variety instead of the usual variations of abstract effects (they are still dope as hell though). I tried to design this app with that in mind, but I definitely see why some people don't find them this styl…