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ProjectM – The most advanced open-source music visualizer

github.com

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

#11

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.

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

#12

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.

Back in the day there was MilkyMist (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)

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

#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 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.

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

#14
post #6

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.

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?

I’ve had segfaults while rendering a variety of presets ; disabling them seems to fix it.

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

#15

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?

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

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

#16

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 Imagine what could have been if every instrument or voice had its own channel...

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://www.lalal.ai/blog/meet-lalal-ai-cassiopeia-a-milesto...

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

#17

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?

there is also Resolume: https://resolume.com/

and TouchDesigner: https://derivative.ca

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

#18
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…

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.

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

#19
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…

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.

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

#20
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…

maybe deadmau5 would change your opinion on that?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY

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