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ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

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Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#51

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?

Not sure about “state of the art” but if you’re on Mac, VDMX ( 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.

+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.

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#52
post #40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, projectm is literally built on 90s tech (Winamp’s milkdrop). For some reason around the early 00s peoples love for visualisations fell out of favour. Meanwhile clubs would still hire dedicated VJs and/or lighting guys so didn’t rely on math-based visualisations. Which meant fewer people contributing to developing cool new math. Worse still, the few industries left that did care about beat detection were…

I still setup both Winamp AVS and ProjectM inside foobar2000 simultaneously to this day. I don't use foobar too much these days, but when I do, I have those two things running.

ProjectM integrates well with PowerAmp on Android too. QNMP (Linux) also supports it but is not as intuitive to configure.

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#54
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.

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#55

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

> 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.

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.

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#58
post #13

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 ins…

Yep. I remember the early visualizers did indeed display something akin to frequency spectral data. I wrote a few visualizers for SoundJam (later iTunes) and the API was exactly that: left and right bucketed spectral data.

I know, bar graphs got a little tiresome so people tried writing more interesting stuff but at some point the "visualizer" became so disconnected from the music that even if you paused the audio the fireworks and "flow fazing" just kept right on doing its thing.

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#59
post #13

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 ins…

It is very simple: just go out and look in a face of a playing/singing musician

Re: ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

#60

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?

Worked with a friend to create NestDrop. It's a VJ interface wrapper for the Milkdrop engine with support for Spout output. http://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.html

Also curated and organized about 9800 Milkdrop presets from the community. https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...

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