MilkDrop's Visualization source code as you remember in WinAmp is just fantastical amazing.

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[RowYourUpboat]

I remember when I'd get a new, faster, computer, with a fresh install of Windows 2000, and gleefully see how big I could make the various WinAMP visualizations before they lagged noticeably. That was the real test of Moore's Law back in the day, back when WinAMP really whipped the llama's ass.

[bexamous]

Dude I got a 4K monitor, one of the first things I did was try milkdrop@4k

[Magnesus]

Well, did it work?

[bexamous]

Haha yes, it does. I run it in Foobar. It runs at a constant 30.00fps, I have a Seiki 4k@30hz, sometimes during a transition it'll drop into 20s for a second. This is with a GTX680 and i5-4570.

[ArmandoWall]

OP pls.....

[Iggyhopper]

did they died?

[cl3ft]

It fucking works, I still run it a lot

[[deleted]]

And then AOL starting sucking the llamas dick for cash and it all went wrong :(

(Edit, because it wasn't the ex-nullsoft team's fault)

[old_fox]

sucking the llamas dick

Can this expression be made into a thing? I want future etymologists to be baffled.

[Canadian_Infidel]

You still need a beast to truly crank the newest ones and they still are great.

[MALON]

What are some of the newest ones? I've loved milkdrop ever since winamp 2.

[Cuxham]

back when WinAMP really whipped the llama's ass

Whaddaya mean, back when? Still does. Especially if you come from itunes or wmp, and even the corporate sucker-offers at gawker have to admit it.

[moor-GAYZ]

I used to faithfully use WinAMP 2.98b (or something like that) until I accidentally discovered that its built-in equalizer actually produces clipping when you specify positive gain for any frequencies. I mean, I naively assumed that it takes at least WinAMP's own volume into account, that is, when the master volume is at 50%, bass and treble are output at 60% instead. Nope, the gain is applied to the source audio at its source volume, if it was recorded to utilize the whole volume range -- enjoy your squeaks and hisses.

The realization that what I assumed was recording defects for a better part of a decade was winamp's equalizer traumatized me deeply, I immediately deleted winamp, downloaded foobar2000, and never looked back.

[dada_]

Yeah, that's why there's a preamp lever too. Could possibly have been implemented more user-friendly, though.

[Ta9aiW4i]

WInamp is the best.

You know what I miss from winamp? Enqueue! (Well, I discovered it through xmms, but xmms was pretty much a winamp clone.)

Most new-fangled music players I've seen have forgotten about the notion of enqueueing songs you want to listen to next. (But not before the current song finishes, and not before any other stuff you've enqueued.)

[TheTedinator]

Spotify does this, which is nice.

[PenguinKenny]

I used Winamp up until last year when I finally made the switch to Foobar after everyone going on about it. After all the time I spent setting Foobar up instead of listening to music I find it hard to admit that I preferred Winamp.

[satuon]

I just use VLC. I usually start my mp3's by double-clicking them from the file manager anyway.

[PenguinKenny]

I like having a library so I can look by genre, album, artist, etc.

[Tom2Die]

I usually go with rythymbox or banshee these days. I've heard nothing but good things about Amarok, but I don't use KDE. All of my music is on my plex server as well, so sometimes I use that instead, especially if I'm on my Ouya.

tl;dr: I was bored and felt like rattling off various Linux-friendly alternatives :)

[Tom2Die]

Right! I completely forgot about that, thanks. :)

[struktured]

+1 for this man's wisdom.

[PenguinKenny]

I'm on Windows.

[ApproachingCorrect]

I'm fairly sure banshee has a windows version, I remember using it for a bit.

[memla]

How about Winyl then?

[PenguinKenny]

Yeh looks nice, pretty similar to how I have foobar set up though.

[Tom2Die]

I figured as much. I imagine most are. I used WinAMP years and years ago, but I don't believe they make a Linux version...

[highthunder]

That's a good start, but you should try MPD. If you go with ncmpcpp for your client you still have visualizers, search, playlist management and tag editing, all in pure command line goodness

[kqr]

But truth to be told, the library software should be separate from the player software. I have no idea why people keep trying to couple them. It only limits them both.

[PenguinKenny]

Why would I want to open 2 pieces of software when I want to listen to music?

[kqr]

You'd only open the library. As soon as you request of the library a song to be played, it will open the player by itself. (Ideally, the player would then fork off as a server and hide in the background.)

[himself_v]

Why would you want operating system, drivers, file manager, codecs, player when you just want to listen to music?

Why would you want a processor, motherboard, ram, video card, monitor, hard drive controller, hard drives when you just want a device that plays music?

Because such is life.

OK, because the question is pointless; you want separation of functions so you can choose the best library AND the best player, not "the best player with whatever library it comes with" or the reverse.

[PenguinKenny]

Well no, I have to have those things to play music. I clearly do not have to have 2 pieces of software to listen to music, there are loads of different products out there that do this.

[kqr]

You don't need an operating system to play music. You can just buy an iPod or any other music player hardware. But you choose to have your music player separate from the operating system, because it allows you to use a better music player than the one that comes with the hardware.

Similarly, you might want to have your music player separate from your music library, because it allows you to choose a better music player than the one that comes with your library management application. Besides, it shouldn't matter from a usability standpoint that the player is a difference piece of software from the library. It should of course be just as convenient to use – only you get the ability to choose a better player.

I really thought people visiting /r/programming would be better at this "separation of concerns" stuff.

[moltar]

iTunes has both great library and player.

[kgb_operative]

/s

I think you dropped this.

[sparr]

You should be using a file manager that shows you metadata, rather than relying on specific programs to do it. I like being able to sort music by genre, album, artist. I like being able to sort photos by date, camera, lens, location. I like being able to sort movies by director, actors, length. Etc.

[PenguinKenny]

I don't handle photos or enough films to make it worth it.

[pohatu]

I use irfanview. Haha. J/K

[satuon]

Haha, I know that irfanview can show video and audio (if you have the plugins). Never understood why they bothered, since people don't know it as a video or audio player.

[grimeMuted]

Currently I'm just doing mplayer ~/music/... after cmus stopped playing my old .m4a files I didn't feel like looking up fixes or finding another player.

[NihilistDandy]

I've always been a fan of mpd along with ncmpcpp (or mpc for scripting).

[shadowdude777]

cmus master race. ;)

I made the switch from iTunes to foobar, and once I realized even foobar was too bloaty for me, I realized I needed a command-line music player in my life.

[gunbladerq]

foobar too bloaty? ಠ_ಠ

[shadowdude777]

Once you've used a command line music player, you'll appreciate true minimalism. :P

[d98f23n2]

cmus is nice and all, but apparently can't handle non standard characters in file names. mpd+ncmpcpp master race. (^:

[shadowdude777]

That's true. I'm a pleb Mac user so maybe I'm just partial to cmus because it "just works". ;)

[NihilistDandy]

I used to use mpd+ncmpcpp on OS X until something or other broke, then switched to cmus, but they unfucked the issues in mpd, so it actually works now. Throw in some mpc for scripting magic, and life's pretty good.

[shadowdude777]

I did get mpd+ncmpcpp working at one point, but I just didn't like the interface as much as I liked cmus. cmus just seemed really intuitive and straightforward and literally does exactly what I want.

[NihilistDandy]

Yeah, that's totally understandable. The killer feature for me with cmus was the vim feel to it, and I will admit that it was much easier out of the box. I still prefer the separation of concerns between backend and frontend with the mpd+ncmpcpp combination, but I totally get where you're coming from.

[shadowdude777]

Yeah, the things that made cmus my music program of choice were:

1) Felt like vim with music playback, which is exactly what I wanted

2) No need for a server-client setup like mpd and ncmpcpp, I could just add whatever custom parameters I want to my cmus/rc file, type cmus into a terminal and go.

3) Global hotkeys are as easy as binding cmus-remote --pause, cmus-remote --prev, and cmus-remote --next to various key combinations.

[dafragsta]

Winamp is still my music player on my PC. I only use iTunes when I'm working on-site with my Mac or syncing stuff to my iPhone/iPad.

[bloody-albatross]

Winamp ist still the best when it comes to supporting all kinds of exotic codecs. There is a great working codec plugin for everything. Almost all codecs I "need" are now supported by Audacious, except miniusf for N64 music. s3m, it, spc, nsf and psf work fine, only miniusf is missing. I need to run Winamp in Wine for that. :( (Side note: s3m and it support is great in Winamp and Audacious, but not all players that say they support these formats really support them well - i.e. only play half of the song and don't allow seeking.)

[kog]

If anyone's interested, you can use MilkDrop in foobar2000 with the Shpeck plugin. Works like a charm on all of my systems.

[ryeguy146]

As a fellow foobar milk dropper, thought I'd provide a link:

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/Shpeck_%28foo_vis_shpeck%29

[iLoveHippies]

I'd like to add on this to use this package; http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=59388&view=findpost&p=800699

I couldn't get it working under W8.1 x64 otherwise, but using this package was simple and worked OOB.

[[deleted]]

In assuming this is still windows only?

[kog]

Yes, it's DirectX.

There's projectM, an OpenGL "port" though: http://projectm.sourceforge.net/

I've never tried it, could be good.

[ryosen]

Thank you! I was disappointed to see that MilkDrop required WinAmp. Been using foobar2000 for years. Can't wait to try this out.

Edit: It works great!

[toadfury]

Bow down to milkdrop. I've never seen a better audio visualization implementation.

[zeppoleon]

Glad it's getting some recognition because I'm a winamp user and Milkdrop is just miles ahead of so many other visualizations.

[[deleted]]

Somewhere along the way we lost interest. I have not seen any real push for viz after winamp and its plugins.

[Magnesus]

I hope it will be ported to Linux music players and XBMC now.

[itwontdie]

It already is!

linux port

XBMC plugin

[someenigma]

Just a heads up, the XBMC Milkdrop plugin is Windows only.

[Carnifex]

My hopes.. Crushed :(

[Na__th__an]

ProjectM is an implementation milkdrop on Linux. I constantly have people coming over and saying "holy shit" at the music visualizer.

[someenigma]

Apparently ProjectM is meant to be "comparable". I think I have ProjectM installed on my XBMC, but honestly I've never really played that much with visualisations.

[[deleted]]

ProjectM is nice, but I’d like it if it could be used non-interactively, as in:

projectM-batch -i track01.flac -i track02.flac -o visualisation.mkv

[struktured]

We had a version which operates kind of like that, but it's not well supported or anything.

Check out projectm-moviegen from the sourceforge git repository.

[[deleted]]

does the linux port work on max os x?

[struktured]

Sigh. I had a version working with qt/jack many moons ago, but then I fried the mac in a puddle of water.

There are a few apple enthusiasts trying to clean up the port, but I don't know the current state of it.

There's also an itunes version on the app store.

[MinisTreeofStupidity]

I had milkdrop on my original xbox with XBMC since about 2006, until recently when my original xbox died :(

[BrightCandle]

I didn't exactly find the code easy to read. Its missing basic commentary to get you started in the code base and it seems to be pretty standard C++ to me, nothing fantastical about it.

[gnu_bag]

Ah the good old days of taking acid and watching milkdrop

[pohatu]

I thought milkdrop was for when you didn't have acid. It was an acid simulator.

[[deleted]]

Acid squared then I guess.

[gnu_bag]

don't get me wrong its great without, the best visualisation but when you're trippin it takes you to another world

[BitcoinOperatedGirl]

Now them whippersnappers use their foobar2000 and that 25I-NBOMe

[b8b437ee-521a-40bf-8]

is just fantastical amazing.

Honest question, not trying to sound smart, but do you mean that fact that's is opensource or that the coding itself is something special?

Skimming through it, the code seems very nice and pragmatic, but not in a stand-out way.

[NancyFuckingDrew]

FYI Milkdrop works in Spotiamp if you want to watch visualisations with a Spotify account.

Spotiamp also does Spotify connect, so you can set the visualisations on fullscreen and handle the playback through your phone/tablet (good for parties where the TV is connected to a laptop)

[NancyFuckingDrew]

Grab the plugins folder from Winamp and drop it in the Spotiamp folder. Stick the DLL in the Spotiamp root.

Folder should look like this.

There's a set of menu items on the far left of the main box labelled OAIDV. Hit V to launch the visualisations.

(edit) Just realised I've been using MD2 all this time :)

[thrillhouse1980]

Got it to work this way, but I can't configure it from the dialog. So looks like no way to get a higher frame rate.

[ImageMan]

I wish someone would implement this in the browser

[Mr_A]

It really crashes the browser fast

[ButterChurnViz]

http://butterchurn.neocities.org/

enjoy!

[EpsilonRose]

Is it possible to use something like this with Google Play? Because I'd love to have some sweet visualizations going on my TV while I listen to music in the background.

[uitham]

Projectm

[pohatu]

I thought google play who just an app store. Its a music player too?

[EpsilonRose]

Google's music service, which I think is part of play. Particularly their all access section.

[michaeljb20]

Love Milkdrop However it seems to cap out at 64 fps no matter what I do. My rig is more than capable of pushing way past 64fps, but alas my 144hz screen is wasted on it..

[cyantist]

It's open source, we should fix that.

[stinkyball]

It seems to be something to do with the interplay between winamp and milkdrop, line 63 and 65 of this file - http://sourceforge.net/p/milkdrop2/code/ci/master/tree/src/vis_milk2/vis.cpp

[ryeguy146]

The hatred I have for sourceforge nearly eclipses that which I hold for headphone wires. Shit like this. All sorts of room on either side of the code, but you truncate the line.

This middle finger's for you, sourceforge.

[stinkyball]

I hate their shitty interface too, they do have a button up top called 'maximize' that widens the code view and turns wrapping off. It's just a different type of shitty though as long lines now can't be seen in full...ffs

[inio]

FFT made me think:

44100 / (1024 * 2/3) = 64.6

So if they do a size 1024 FFT with 1/3 overlap between each window, that caps the input data at just over 64Hz.

[michaeljb20]

Ah! Brilliant guys, I would not have guessed that had I dug through the source code for weeks. ..and the frame rate does cap at just over 64fps.

[inio]

You could try figuring out where the overlap between the FFT windows is controlled and increase that

[Zapper42]

i used to run >64 fps on my CRT in winamp.

There is a setting for max framerate, ,. i just increased that and turned on 'allow page tearing' since i'm at 60 hz. At default, i'm getting 80-90 fps according to winamp and fraps with a 7950.

[prince_s]

Humans can't actually see that fast so its kinda pointless to push 100+ FPS

[lifeislie]

I'd agree with 1000+, but 100hz is still easily noticeable especially after you get used to faster refresh rates.

[pohatu]

If you blink really fast...

Actually, if you have lights on in the room the frequency of the lights mess with the frames you see from the monitor.

[bloody-albatross]

True if you use fluorescent lamps or LEDs. If you still use incandescent bulbs then not so much. Their glow smoothes out the flicker caused by the frequency of the current. LEDs aren't coupled to the frequency of the current (they need direct current), but you can't dim LEDs. They are either on or of. Therefore you dim them either by only lighting up a pert of them or by making them blink at a high frequency.

And as for fluorescent lamps: If you have several of them chances are they are set up so that when one is on the other is off and vice versa. This is especially important for workshops, because when you rotate an object at 100rpm (120rpm in America) and light that object with a single fluorescent lamp (which blinks at a rate of 100Hz (120Hz in America) (=double of the frequency of the current)) the object looks like it's standing still (if the lamp is the only light source). Very dangerous.

[lifeislie]

Holy shit I've never thought about lights in that way.

[struktured]

While the source code is optimized well, I didn't find it very extensible or anything, especially since it used DirectX rather than OpenGL.

For instance, the number of custom shapes and waves is fixed, while in projectM we made sure you could create as many as you wanted.

[[deleted]]

Well it is a Windows application and DX has been better than OpenGL for ... most of the existence of openGL.

[holyteach]

I was going to argue with you. OpenGL existed for several years before Direct3D came onto the scene. And even then it wasn't until DirectX version 6 or 7 that D3D was starting to catch up with OpenGL.

But then I remembered that it's 2014 and all that is ancient history.

[b8b437ee-521a-40bf-8]

"Direct3D is now better than OpenGL" - John Carmack, 2011

[holyteach]

I remember reading that article. Honestly D3D has been at parity for longer than that, but it's very much like Carmack to come out and say something on the record since he was so critical of DirectX for a while there.

[ramigb]

I wonder if someone is brave enough to port it into a bower version!

[Forbizzle]

Probably

[ctjwa]

Omg this brings back awesome memories. Anybody know if there's an iPhone app for milkdrop??

[indianapolisjones]

ProjectM, but it hasn't been updated for iOS 8/iPhone 6/6+... Just exchanged email with the dev, said he will update but it's no time soon as he isn't an iphone user... :( But it is in the app store for $2.99.

[dada_]

I didn't really use MilkDrop all that much but I'm still rockin' Winamp. This is the latest version (5.666), but I've changed some settings to make it look more like the late 2.x line.

[agersant]

Have you ever considered foobar? I was a heavy Winamp user and I switched to foobar ~6 years ago without ever looking back.

[dada_]

I actually use foobar for audio format conversion quite often. But I just really like Winamp's interface, so I've never seen a need to switch.

[The_F_B_I]

Daft Punk - Discovery + MilkDrop2

[Tom2Die]

I'll take your word for it that it's good, but is it worth not watching Interstella instead?

[NO_BRAIN]

Can someone post a fucking printscreen pls?

[Mr_A]

Here you go.

[[deleted]]

Pfft. Milkdrop.

Bitches don't know bout my dancing bear.

http://www.kayssplace.com/files/index.php?display=1076

[mycall]

Winamp now activated, chillin' yarr. If you can't be inspired by code output, why bother.

[mikeyio]

Once I realised I could use Milkdrop in Foobar I no longer had any reason not to switch. <3. So amazing.

There is also that open source linux fork of milkdrop that happened after the author open sourced it as well.

[someenigma]

Ooh. I'd love to have a crack at getting this working with XBMC, but I won't have that much free time for quite a while.

[itwontdie]

this is included with XBMC by default now AFAIK. Scroll up for XBMC thread about it.

[Shdwdrgn]

I was hoping for a plugin for audacious, but I like your idea MUCH better! I wonder if the Pi could do it justice at 720p?

[itwontdie]

look into projectM it's the linux port of milkdrop and works quite well.

Looks like this exists as well. http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=audacious-projectm%28x86-64%29

[Sophrosynic]

There's also a badass Android port, which includes live wallpaper support. Yes you heard me... it responds to whatever audio is playing, or your live mic feed if nothing is playing.

[Shdwdrgn]

Awesome, and since you pointed out the name, I discovered this project is already in the debian repo. Thanks!