Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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Cool, man! I've wanted a standalone player to do this ever since WinAmp used to support this 20 years ago, but seemingly the capability was lost to time when everyone decided they'd rather watch recorded video. The composer Stephen Malinowski's YouTube channel is one of my favorites because all of the videos are visualizations of music he's generated with custom midi-reading software he made, i.e.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffYKCNY6kUk. He first wrote this software in 1985 a decade after getting the idea from listening to Bach on LSD.

It's just too bad this is a browser extension because I really don't want more of those. I get that the economics probably don't make sense to do any more, given the effort to make a standalone desktop app would be a lot and a website people could upload tracks to in order to get a visualization would force you to pay hosting costs.

Also a fan of Malinowski's animated music videos. My immediate thought was that it would be cool to see this extension sort of mimic his piano roll animations by having it appear vertically on the left. Less pixel space though, so I don't know...

Would also be cool if the dots on the pitch line that represent accidentals were perhaps a slightly darker shade so it'd be easier to see the typical piano pattern in them. (Like ⦾⦿⦾⦿⦾⦾⦿⦾⦿⦾⦿⦾ kinda thing.)

Anyway, to original poster: very cool extension, thanks for sharing! :)

Actually, you can use mpv player and install visualizer.lua on mpv-scripts repository. The engine of YouTube Musical spectrum (showcqt-js) is a javascript port of ffmpeg showcqt filter.

For any Arch based users, I made an AUR entry for this;

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mpv-visualizer/

For a website, probably you want to try this example at https://mfcc64.github.io/html5-showcqtbar/

That Stephen Malinowski link was great. I don’t know that song by name, but I could unmistakably tell what song it was just by looking at the visualization (even though I left the video muted)!

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