ProjectM: LGPL Reimplementation of Ryan Geiss' Milkdrop from Winamp/Kodi | Hacker News Reader

ProjectM: LGPL Reimplementation of Ryan Geiss' Milkdrop from Winamp/Kodi

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148 pointsmzs30 comments

I prefer the style of the original Geiss plugin (http://www.geisswerks.com/geiss/shots.html) to Milkdrop, but every recent project I know (I know if this one and https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn) reimplements Milkdrop. It would seem like there should be a set of Milkdrop presets that makes it look like Geiss, but I could not find one.

Does anyone know a working visualiser more similar to Geiss?

Have you ever thought about bringing that to life?

I had looked into an older version of projectM and the logic is pretty simple overall: use the current frame as a texture and render it to a slightly distorted grid. Then render a new wave on top.

The grid distortion causes all the motion. But the distortion is static over the lifetime of the animation.

A bit more is needed to make it look decent but this was the main loop iirc. A few hundred lines of OpenGL code.

Geiss looks nice, I think it needs more variation on the frame projection and wave drawing.

I agree on both counts; preferring the Geiss plugin and that milkdrop gets all the attention.

Geiss felt a lot closer to the actual music being played, the patterns and movement were much more viscerally associated with the music from which it was being generated.

Having said that, there are some absolutely beautiful visualisations in milkdrop and ProjectM.

Edited to add: milkdrop is Geiss plus other things. Like the modern internet is the old internet plus other things. I think I might be "old man golden-aging" about Geiss. I think I just need to spend time tuning Milkdrop / ProjectM to my preferences (basically turn off the patterns I don't like). I don't have the time like I used to :/

Love projectM!

To this day I use it for VJ work and it always gets rave reviews.

With the OSS project I've been able to build a great workflow for previewing and picking the best patterns for my aesthetic.

If I had one feature request it would be a way to take a set of patterns and an MP3 file and render an output video faster than real-time. It's much easier to use pre-rendered videos and tempo adjust them in VJ software than doing live rendering.

Edit: GH Issue discussing rendering: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm/issues/205

You might dig NestDrop for queuing up presets and then outputting the visuals to a Spout video stream, which most VJ softwares can ingest. Or you can install the OBS Spout plugin into OBS and then record the full rez visuals directly. Here is a tutorial I made demoing it - https://youtu.be/yHqs-EeoIfQ?t=414

This also allows you to inject live video into the Milkdrop engine. Here is another tutorial I made - https://vimeo.com/599028390 https://vimeo.com/450122956

I did a ton of curation of presets and here my cream of the crop pack containing 9,795 presets - https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...

More info about NestDrop - https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php

And on a tangent, you might enjoy my StyleGAN VJ loops - https://www.jasonfletcher.info/vjloops/

NestDrop and the dome look amazing! I found the Cream of the Crop presets thru that project. If that's your work too THANK YOU.

Unfortunately the NestDrop windows dependency doesn't work for me now, but we're on the same wavelength.

My workflow uses OBS to preview presets on top of videos to make sure the patterns will look great with alpha / luma filter in VJ stuff, as well as OBS to record.

Thrilled to hear that you've found my Cream of the Crop pack useful! So rarely do I get to hear back from performers.

Not sure if you also saw my mashups pack, you might enjoy it - https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/08/18/nestdrop-presets-coll...

Yes I saw. It’s on the list to go thru these someday too :)

Very cool to see more people working on this kinda stuff. I have https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn integrated into https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp within my desktop environment in the browser https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS. I listen to soma.fm streaming on my website every day with MilkDrop running in Desktop Mode.

Melee gameplay keeps getting crazier and crazier - now it's ported to Winamp?

e: the joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_M

i made the opposite joke when Project M came out

It's amazing how a visualizer from over a decade ago is still best-in-class.

The next best thing I've seen is Electric Sheep, but it doesn't react to the actual music.

Hmm I guess it would be fairly easy to hook music into Electric Sheep actually. I wonder if anyone has done it already.

It's not quite that easy, but it _is_ doable! Spot and I worked on it a while ago. Sheep are, at their core animated fractal flam3s with post processing. And those have a latent space. :)

I think he made something commercial with it, but thanks for reminding me... more than a decade has passed and compute is much cheaper now, I might try something with it again. (Or better yet, you should!)

Very interesting, I'd be curious to hear more about this project. So it was a realtime flame thing with audio reaction?

I am surprised that Spotify doesn’t have a visualization mode, especially for their tv apps.

I’ll have to try this out.

Right now listening to Spotify through my hifi, with ProjectM visualisations via Android TV and have thought the same thing about Spotify's crappy 10s video loops for only a select few songs - gotta be something, anything, better than that.

I was always a fan of G-Force and Whitecap [0]. There were whispers of this coming to Linux one day, but I don't think it ever materialized (publicly at least).

[0]: https://www.soundspectrum.com/g-force/

Appears to be implemented in Libvisual [1] though I'm not sure that project is still alive. It should be the way to go forward for this type of content.

I liked Milkdrop, a lot! But there were a few others which were my personal preference.

[1] https://github.com/Libvisual/libvisual/tree/master/libvisual...

Does anyone know if there is something equivalent for VR?

Gravity is very cool. Take some time to experiment with all the different visualization combinations.

https://sidequestvr.com/app/6172/gravity

A few years ago I tried Plane9[1] in VR. It does music visualization too and has a VR mode. If I recall the effect was not so much you were in it, but you could see it playing out in front of you. But there was depth and stuff to it. It hasn't been updated in quite sometime I feel.

Another one I tried is DMT: Dynamic Music Tesseract. It is designed from the ground up for VR, however, I feel the animations were more responsive than reactive, if that makes sense. The animations tended to go faster or slower, flash brighter or darker depending on the music. It was fun to sit in and listen to music with but definitely not the level of MilkDrop

--- [1]: https://www.plane9.com/ [2]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/648890/DMT_Dynamic_Music_...

I'm sure I could make something nice given a VR headset and 2-6months. ;-)

Volta XR https://www.volta-xr.com Create mixed reality music performances for free!

Ah also while not quite the same, Rez Infinite in VR is very entertaining.

You could stream it to Virtual Desktop or run the Android app through Oculus TV

What about in 3D?

yes, perhaps with vorpx or reshade https://reshade.me/ https://www.vorpx.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vorpx/comments/vz15xt/vorpx_virtual... https://github.com/retroluxfilm/reshade-vrtoolkit/releases

i did winamp stereoscopic 3d visualisation long ago with the emagin z800 and the stereoscopic 3d nvidia drivers. It's very pretty!

The Apple Music plugin appears to use the "iTunes Visual SDK", which from my web searches appears to be undocumented as still supported in Apple Music (although obviously is). Here's the code for the plugin:

https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/frontend-music-plug-i...

Next Level visualisations from King Gizzard:

https://youtu.be/Njk2YAgNMnE

Absolutely entrancing film clip (and, for me at least, music)

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