14 Free iTunes Visualizers
Apple’s iTunes application is perhaps the most popular app ever installed on the Mac. It’s also one of the least flexible, in terms of customization. There’s little you can do to “make it your own,” so to speak. However, all is not lost for habitual tweakers like myself; the iTunes Visualizer can satisfy your need to not leave well-enough alone.
If you display your iTunes window on a second monitor, or just like to look at the iTunes Visualizer full screen on your 30″ LCD, you should know that you have some really nice options available for customizing the appearance of the Visualizer.
iTunes default Visualizer
Invoking the Visualizer by hitting Command + T (hit Command + F to make it full screen if you wish) then hitting the ? key brings up an overlay on the Visualizer screen containing a few keyboard shortcuts to control various aspects of whichever Visualizer you’re running at the time. But these customizations only go so far. To move beyond minor tweaks to Apple’s built-in Visualizers, you can install a number of truly cool third-party Visualizers which really enhance the iTunes experience.
Download More Visualizers
I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite Visualizers to get you started. This is by no means a complete list, so if you’re looking for even more, I suggest a quick Google search to quench your thirst.
All the Visualizers listed below work perfectly with OS X Leopard, iTunes 8.2, and are free to download and use. Click the preview image to go directly to the download page of each Visualizer.
Punkt Visualizer
Punkt is a Quartz Composer Visualizer that is much cooler than it appears in this screenshot. Colors burst to the beat of your music.
Circle Visualizer
Circle places the track name, artist and album in a circular format, and floats in a 3D space.
Fountain Music Visualizer
Fountain Music is probably one of my favorite Visualizers. It reminds me of the drummers in The Blue Man Group, where water is blasting upwards from the drums, highlighted by bright neon lights as they play. Fountain Music also has a decent amount of customization options, such as particle size and color.
Dragon Visualizer
Dragon features a squishy, squirmy dragon dancing to your music. I almost feel like this one borders on being somewhat icky — but it’s truly awesome.
WhiteCap Visualizer
WhiteCap places dynamic wireframe mesh visuals on your screen, cycling through colors and traveling through space.
Figure Visualizer
Figure places the track title, album, artist and album art on a virtual wall, swiveling around in 3D space.
Bugaboo Visualizer
Bugaboo places colorful dancing lightning bugs on screen. This is another one of those that you have to see to appreciate.
Cubism Visualizer
Cubism brings a Tetris-like appearance to your Visualizer, bouncing blocks to the beat of your music. A 3D cube with the album art mingles among the blocks as well.
Gaslight Visualizer
Gaslight is a customizable frequency spectrum analyzer — kind of old-school, but still quite nice!
Snow Visualizer
Snow, another offering from WowLab, displays colorful snow blowing across your screen. This one is really nice for soothing music after a rough day at the office.
LED Flow Visualizer
LED Flow uses Apple’s Quartz technology to place a colorful level meter in 3D space.
G-Force Visualizer
G-Force, the original awesome third-party Visualizer for iTunes, still going strong with its fractal goodness!
Sing Visualizer
Sing places a friendly little creature in your iTunes window and sings. Sort of. Well, it’s cool to look at anyway.
Jumping Steve Visualizer
Jumping Steve pays homage to Steve Jobs with a cutout jumping jack that dances to the beat. Hit the P key for a special iPod commercial-like silhouette feature.
Don’t forget that different Visualizers will offer disparate customization options, the level of which (if any) varies between minor, and fairly major stuff — it just depends on the developer, and how much time they bothered to put in. Don’t forget to hit the ? key to find out what options are available to you.
If you’ve never installed a plugin or other add-on to iTunes, Visualizers are a great place to start. They’re simple, require little effort to get up and running, and typically they either work or they don’t, with no ill side-effects.
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TUAW Tip: Control the iTunes visualizer
Filed under: TUAW Tips
By now you’ve probably had the opportunity to play around with the new iTunes Visualizer in iTunes 8. It’s pretty cool, eh? Just like the previous visualizer, you can control this one with a few, simple key strokes. By pressing “?” while the visualizer is running, you are presented with a list of keys that customize the visualizer.
- ? - Shows/hides the help screen
- M - Changes the mode
- P - Changes the color palette
- I - Displays the track information for the currently playing song
- C - Toggles “auto-cycle” (which is turned on by default)
- F - Toggles the “freeze mode”
- N - Shows/hides the “smoke” in the background
- L - Toggles camera lock
Know of any more cool key combos for iTunes visualizers? Be sure to tell us in the comments!
Thanks to Luke and others for the tip!
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections.
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TUAW Tip: Control the iTunes visualizer
Filed under: TUAW Tips
By now you’ve probably had the opportunity to play around with the new iTunes Visualizer in iTunes 8. It’s pretty cool, eh? Just like the previous visualizer, you can control this one with a few, simple key strokes. By pressing “?” while the visualizer is running, you are presented with a list of keys that customize the visualizer.
- ? - Shows/hides the help screen
- M - Changes the mode
- P - Changes the color palette
- I - Displays the track information for the currently playing song
- C - Toggles “auto-cycle” (which is turned on by default)
- F - Toggles the “freeze mode”
- N - Shows/hides the “smoke” in the background
- L - Toggles camera lock
Know of any more cool key combos for iTunes visualizers? Be sure to tell us in the comments!
Thanks to Luke and others for the tip!
Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW’s Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections.
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Splash that iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors
Filed under: Tips and tricks, iTunes
iPodHacks has a very easy way to display your iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors using Mac OS X’s built-in accessibility zoom feature.
The instructions show you how to enable Zoom in the Universal Access system preference pane. When the visualizer is playing, you can zoom in on the iTunes window, and the image of the window is spread across all your screens.
The quality of the zoom, of course, is a bicubic interpolation of the screen image, so it’s not as crisp as it could be. Also, the fluidity of the display depends greatly on how powerful your video card is, and how it’s connected to your computer. Multiple video cards also don’t necessarily help, unlike with the original Magnetosphere visualizer.
For a party, though, it’s a neat trick. If you have other ways to make this happen, feel free to leave a comment!
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Splash that iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors
Filed under: Tips and tricks, iTunes
iPodHacks has a very easy way to display your iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors using Mac OS X’s built-in accessibility zoom feature.
The instructions show you how to enable Zoom in the Universal Access system preference pane. When the visualizer is playing, you can zoom in on the iTunes window, and the image of the window is spread across all your screens.
The quality of the zoom, of course, is a bicubic interpolation of the screen image, so it’s not as crisp as it could be. Also, the fluidity of the display depends greatly on how powerful your video card is, and how it’s connected to your computer. Multiple video cards also don’t necessarily help, unlike with the original Magnetosphere visualizer.
For a party, though, it’s a neat trick. If you have other ways to make this happen, feel free to leave a comment!
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Rumor: new visualizer in iTunes 8 to be Robert Hodgin’s Magnetosphere
Filed under: Audio, Multimedia, Rumors, iTunes
On the heels of our earlier post about new features in iTunes 8 comes this post from video producer and designer Allan White, speculating that the new visualizer in iTunes might be Processing artist Robert Hodgin’s amazing Magnetosphere, which was available up until a few months ago from The Barbarian Group (aka Robert’s design company) as an iTunes plugin.
As Allan points out, there are two very strong pieces of evidence for this: 1) Allan emailed Robert, who told him Magnetosphere had been sold to a “third party”, and 2) a twitter from Digg founder (and amateur Apple rumor mill) Kevin Rose on Sept. 2nd describing the new visualizer as “planet like objects wrapping around each other w/stars/light streams”. As you can see in the image above, this sounds like a pretty apt description of Magnetosphere, which visualizes sound as particle explosions like supernovas. The Barbarian Group website’s page for Magnetosphere says that “We’ve had a ton of interest in it, and we’ve got some exciting plans, but it’s gonna take us a couple months to make it all happen.”
Of course, nothing is confirmed, but it all points in the right direction. Personally, I’d love to see Magnetosphere on every iTunes user’s screen, and not just because Robert is an amazing artist and also always gracious and helpful when I email him because my Processing particle system animations don’t look as cool as his. The world just needs stuff this cool-looking everywhere.
(Thanks to Poopie for noticing that I’d accidentally added an “s” to “Hodgin”!)
[via Create Digital Music]
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Create Digital Music rounds up iTouch / iPhone music apps
Filed under: Audio, iPod Family, Multimedia, Software, iPhone
The lovely and talented Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music has posted a round up of music apps for the iPod / iTouch platform. The list includes tools for using your iPhone as a MIDI/OSC controller, making random weird digital art, visualizing your music and, er, listening to Snow Patrol’s next album, amongst other apps. Peter’s a thoughtful critic and his evaluations are pretty detailed and thorough.
If you’re an aspiring iPhone musician / DJ/ sound designer, this is definitely a good place to start finding useful apps.
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