Show HN: A music player that creates real-time music videos

I've been working on a music player that combines audio analysis and shaders to create music videos that play alongside your music. The videos are similar to the style of edited music videos you can often find on youtube and the like, but are done in real-time!

edit: to clarify some confusion, this app is basically a music player similar to wallpaper engine but with more focus on visualizations. the trailer contains an example of the videos produced - you load your images into the app, and the app uses it to create a visualization synchronized with the music similar to the style of edited music videos.

I really like it. I think a lot of the criticisms could be solved by finding a bunch of royalty-free images to have preloaded, neutral patterns/graphics so it's not restricted to working for specific genres, and across the images put some subtle text saying "Demo graphics, replace with your own..."

You basically want to show the best possible example of it working, right out of the box, as that very first impression is what sticks.

For your demo video I'd also have it change music genres during the demo, and with each change also change the images to suit that genre. Show 10 seconds of generic rock and have the images be a concert, then switch to 10 seconds of classical music and have the images be nature/space, etc.

I think I'm one of the few who still have a large local music library and listen to it lots, usually while working on hardware projects or writing/sketching ideas, so I'd happily use something like this up on my monitor while doing so.

Are there any demos available? Like, examples of what the music videos look like?

I'm a little wary of downloading what appears to be closed-source software and running it, especially if I don't know if it's something I'd be interested in using.

Otherwise, it's a really cool idea (I LOVE the old winamp visualizers).

Just gave this a whirl and it's pretty neat! Some feedback:

- App looks very pretty. Highlights are the subtle animations when scrolling long lists in the Library, and using album art in individual rows.

- I like the output of the visualizer. The glitch transition between tracks looks great.

- Having the visualizer in the background while browsing music is a bit distracting.

- Definitely needs some default imagery for the visualizer, I expected it to work out of the box.

- Took a really long time to index my music collection (about 20 minutes for metadata and another 5 minutes to generate thumbnails). This is for 81,000 songs w/ a high-end desktop computer.

- Under library > artist, `Unknown Artist` has almost all albums attributed to it. Most of my collection is MP3 with ID3v2.4 tags (artist field always populated, album artist populated when applicable). In Hyperchroma, most artists are listed with the correct number of songs, but 0 albums.

Probably not what you're after, but I think this could be very successful as a free/cheap alternative to After Effects specifically to generate the music videos. (rather than a music player)

The demo here is underwhelming compared to old-school winamp visualizers.

But I think that with deep learning, there is now a real opportunity to make a kickass visualizer. Take a GAN and set the latent vector according to the DFT of the audio stream -- it would be super trippy. You could even use WaveNet and CLIP to make the visuals match the lyrics.

The idea seems quite nice but the execution isn't.

This uses crazy amounts of resources for what it offers. Electron just isn't the right platform for such a thing, imho.

Should be a nice Rust / OCaml / C++ / "whatever native" app with max. 10% the size and 1% of the current resource usage.

Maybe it's better on other systems regarding resources but the Linux version I've tried made my laptop fan go into fighter-jet mode. That's not appropriate for playing music and showing some "shaken images". When using my desktop media player (smplayer) and projectM as visualization there is hardly any load on the same system (and the fan remains of course completely off).

I'm not sure the media player component in this project here is even needed. If the visualization needs to analyze larger parts of the audio it could delay and buffer the signal (which would work for longer running background music well enough), or just analyze the files on disk upfront and save the results externally. At least on Linux there is some generic audio player interface that shows for example a widget in the task bar (I don't know about the details how this works, but it works). Information from this interface could be used to know which track is playing currently and get notified about track changes (showing the title and cover art and offering play/stop/pause/forward/rewind buttons is what the generic audio player widget can do so the needed information about player state is available and can be obtained likely also form other apps). I would guess such an audio player interface is also there on other desktop operating systems so such a visualization could be made cross platform likely.

Just my 2¢.

Does it have integration with "popular music streaming services", as nowadays it is rare for users to have their music in mp3 format.

Just seeing the title made me think of the mid-90s DOS MOD music player "Grind": https://youtube.com/watch?v=dJHnAoeQPGU

Are real-time videos just photo transitions with effects?

I just tried this, and I only got the big logo slowly floating in the middle of the screen, no matter what music I play. Am I missing something?

I really like how this looks, and it'd be pretty nice to have it running on the monitor I have above my main monitor. Problem is that I only have s3m, it and xm etc. music as actual local files, which this player don't seem to support. Most other music (like the bakcground jazz I keep in the background) is streamed.

This crashes on macOS for me:

> … not valid for use in process: mapped file has no cdhash, completely unsigned? Code has to be at least ad-hoc signed.

Any demo video to understand what kind of output it will be?

Project looks great!

Tho, out of curiosity: Is it open source/will be?

Is it built on electron?

Kudos for the effort. Now If you have a beast processor like M1 I presume it would run ok, but still, and this makes my 5+ year old machine cooking omelet, would never use it because of this. Also mentioned here in comments, dvx/lofi is the same story, Electron and webgl shaders, just not acceptable performance for such a tiny thing. Old school demoscene coders is where we should learn how to write efficient software for such tasks.