[HN Gopher] ProjectM - The most advanced open-source music visua...
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       ProjectM - The most advanced open-source music visualizer
        
       Author : ushakov
       Score  : 87 points
       Date   : 2021-10-23 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | 01100011 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | Zababa wrote:
         | What webgl visualizer do you use? I have trouble with ProjectM
         | too.
        
         | grepfru_it wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | I've had segfaults while rendering a variety of presets ;
           | disabling them seems to fix it.
        
       | colordrops wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | ushakov wrote:
         | there is also Resolume: https://resolume.com/
         | 
         | and TouchDesigner: https://derivative.ca
        
         | CoolestBeans wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | grepfru_it wrote:
           | 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)
        
         | ruined wrote:
         | 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
        
       | chmod775 wrote:
       | The demo video is a bit buried:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dSam8zwSFw
        
       | kaladin-jasnah wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | matheusmoreira wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | rektide wrote:
         | 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...
        
           | matheusmoreira wrote:
           | > 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...
        
       | audunw wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | maybe deadmau5 would change your opinion on that?
         | 
         | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrb5PqiDMSY
        
         | jamal-kumar wrote:
         | 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-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
         | 
         | 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
        
         | Fellshard wrote:
         | The gag to this song[1] is a bit crass, but one of the
         | visualization tools in particular has always caught my eye: the
         | hexagonally-arranged note visualization. It seems to capture a
         | number of chord relationships in a very intriguing and
         | intuitive way.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hmwXThnqi0
        
           | motohagiography wrote:
           | Thought I recognized one of the viz methods, and the
           | hexoganal representation of the chords may be based on this
           | idea from Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz
        
             | codetrotter wrote:
             | Also similar:
             | 
             | https://www.semantic-danielou.com/semantic-
             | danielou-53/hex-h...
             | 
             | https://llllllll.co/t/hybrid-hexagonal-keyboard-for-midi-
             | typ...
             | 
             | http://www.yeco.io/introhexblog.html
             | 
             | https://www.lumatone.io/
             | 
             | https://hackaday.com/2019/07/13/isomorphic-keyboards-with-
             | cv...
             | 
             | https://reverb.com/au/item/18946829-c-thru-music-
             | axis-49-iso...
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard
             | 
             | https://web.archive.org/web/20120219085411/http://www.thesh
             | a...
             | 
             | https://www.dynamictonality.com/hex.htm
             | 
             | I saw some music software once also a few years ago that
             | mentioned this type of input device. Don't remember if the
             | software in question was a VST or a DAW or what it was so
             | can't find it at the moment. The software that mentioned it
             | may have been open source but I don't remember.
        
       | grepfru_it wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | Not to be confused with the community-loved but hated-by-nintendo
       | mod of smash brawl, Project M: https://pmunofficial.com/
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | > 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 wrote:
           | Which huge Twitter thread?
        
       | Ceyarrecks wrote:
       | while it looks seemingly pretty, it is stated as ONLY working on
       | win os X. Keep it.
        
         | laumars wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | tytrdev wrote:
       | Thought maybe rollback was coming for ProjectM players for a
       | second ={
        
       | xook wrote:
       | > 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.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-23 23:00 UTC)