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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

#62
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…

The problem there isn't necessarily development, but rather the data accessible to developers.

What you need to have that level of visual interaction is the original stems (or something which emulates them relatively closely).

Services like https://www.lalal.ai/ are a step in the right direction, and will probably lead to what you--and many of us--crave. But as it is now, they require way too much computing to provide meaningful enough data fast enough to build a real-time visualiser.

But even then there is the whole issue of copyright which would bottleneck development even further...

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#64
post #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.

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!

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

#65
post #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.

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 ca…

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.

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

#66

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

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.

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

#67
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

We welcome PRs and generally respond quickly to them. It's a completely community-driven project and we're always looking for help.

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

#68

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."

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.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Like it or not, 'IP' exists. By doing these kind of projects, sadly these people relinquish their rights. They could be 1) fighting for change in these laws, 2) investing in free culture/software. Sadly, almost all of them don't. They are happy to operate in that grey space as long as it is tolerated, but they should know that they are on borrowed time. Big companies striking with absurd power at fan projects should help drive the point home, and should be the occasion to advocate for open standards.
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