Winamp Visualizations

In My Humble Opinion
1

What are the best visualizations, and where are the good sites to get them? I get most of mine from winamp.com because usually the ones i find using search engines are a. crappy, b. dead links, or c. trojan carriers. I love visualizations because when the right music and the right effect sync up perfectly and you are totally focused on it - the experience is indescribably amazing. Last weekend a couple of friends of mine and i had the pleasure of munching some none-too tasty shrooms and chillin out in my best friends dope pad. we hooked the s-video out on his system to his 36" Sony XBR HDTV (1080 lines of res, baby) and watched visualizations to Brian Eno, DJ Shadow, Fila Brazilia, Howie B, K & D, L.S.G., Nightmares on Wax, Smith and Mighty, Thievery Corp, and dozens other amazing trip hop, electronic, D & B, and ambient artists. By the end of the night we all agreed that we had experienced these visualizations in a way we never had before but always dreamed of. Also, DVD’s on fast-foward with a cd that has a fast beat are amazing as well (i recommend Flash Gordon with Tabla Beat Science). We only had a crappy 8 meg ATI Rage Mobility graphics card but it was still more than i could have hoped for. When i save up enough for my Athalon, GeForce 2 Ultra (GeForce 3 by then?) system I’m certain our minds will be effectively blown out the back of our skulls. In this thread please share any experiences with visualizations you may have had and possibly which you use at what settings and on what system.

PIII 550, 128 SDRAM, Diamond Stealth III S540 16MB PCI OpenGL

G-Force 2.0
800 x 600 x 32
Just the Best- beautiful, amazing, and on-beat

WhiteCap 4.0
1024 x 768 x 32
Always meets or exceeds my expectations

Epica 2.0
1024 x 768 x 32
Looks fantastic at high res, but gets repetitive

Tripex 2
720 x 576 x 32
Some effects like “Meatballs” look incredible but others like “light tentacles” are too slow on my system to enjoy

Punkie 1.51
720 x 480 x 8
Superfast and smooth- really twists your brain if you let it

Mad Spin 1.2
640 x 480 x 32
When your brain is boiling at 106 degrees those sparkles go to a whole new level

Eonic 0.2
640 x 480 x 32
Pretty and runs reasonably well but repetitive

Acidspunk II
640 x 480 x 32
Oldschool vis and still good, but just cant compete with the new ones
I don’t use:

AVS- Time consuming and a pain in the ass

Space- weak, tacky effects

Winamp Goes 3D- buggy on my system

Winamp GL- buggy on my system and boring

Geiss- Outdated and overplayed- i’ve had geiss from way, way back

2

…since I’ve done much the same thing. Of course, I did it 12-13 years ago and was watching everything in glorious black & white on an 8" Macintosh SE screen and the effect was really nothing more than lines jumping around but we were suitably mesmerized nonetheless.

As for suggesting other visualizations I can’t. You already mentioned all I would and included one I haven’t checked out yet. I’d have to put my vote on G-Force for the best of them all however. That one just has style and never ceases to be new and refreshing!

I definitely recommend a new video card for top notch visualizations. Till I recently upgraded my PC I was doing all of the stuff you mentioned on a P-II 400 with a GeForce 256. The video card is what really gives legs to the system overall.

Any of the video cards you mentioned would be good but the GeForce 3 looks un-freakin-believeable. Of course at a retail price of $550-600 it had better be amazing. If you’re not going for top-notch 3-D gaming power I’d say any GeForce card on your system should play these visualizations nicely. You also might look at an ATI Radeon card for a very decent video board but at a fraction of the price of Nvidia products (it performs nearly as well and even has a few features Nvidia boards up to the GeForce don’t have).

3

This is really more of an IMHO thing. I’ll shoot it over there for you.

4

Thank you. I just discovered visualizations the other day and began exploring them (from winamp.com). There’s so much to learn about how they’re done and how to concoct cool new ones. Your tips will be a big help. Thank you.

You know what I thought while tripping out to the beautiful intricate swirling colors? Remember the Fillmore concerts in San Francisco in the 60s? The light shows that were made in a low-tech way with colored gels and oil/water mixtures on overhead projectors? They were attempting to reproduce the psychedelic experience without drugs, with just music and colored light. If only they could have had this technology back then! What they were trying to achieve has finally arrived. When you have cool music and cool visualizations, you don’t even need drugs to have a psychedelic experience. I want to hook up a projector to my computer, turn the lights out, and have a party with Advanced Visualization Laboratory projected on the wall.

5

Actually, the real pioneer of music visualizations was Aleksandr Skriabin, at the beginning of the 20th century. For his orchestral piece Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, he invented the Light Organ and composed a part in the score for it. When you played its keyboard, instead of making sound, it projected different colors and shapes on a screen. He assigned a specific color to each note in the scale, so that playing chords on the Light Organ would project either harmonious or dissonant color combinations. Skriabin was the first multimedia composer, struggling to create a new art form before the world was ready for it. Imagine if he were alive today!

6

Put in my little note, updated the “moved threads” thread, and… forgot to move the damn thing.

Off it goes now.

Sheesh!

7

I just got WinAmp last week and haven’t explored visualizations a lot. My modified version of “Better than Sex” is pretty cool, but I’ll get some of the ones you recommended.