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Visualization Plugins & G-Force, Oh My!
Feedmag is running a story about Andy O'Meara, the guy behind G-Force, as well as some other aspects of the visualization for plugins for *Amp, XMMS etc. Playing around with the visualizations is a huge amount of fun, and it's interesting to see what types of music produce different visuals. And unlike psydelics, it's legal.
/me checks his list of XMMS plugins... Well I'll be damned, there it is.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Salvia Divinorum is perfectly legal, and I've seen it for sale a lots of plantstores, including home depot once. Check erowid.org for information on it.
You left out Waterfall, my spectrogram viz plugin.
Let me share a Nasty Thought I've had concerning the current intellectual "property" environment and music visualizers.
The media conglomerates are advancing the position -- unfortunately with a lot of success -- that any use of "their" music not explicitly authorized by them is prima facie unauthorized and therefore illegal.
If we were to regard this view as legitimate, then when you purchase a CD, you have received a license from the media conglomerate to listen to it, and nothing else. You have not been authorized to perform it publicly (such as at a party), you have not been authorized to extract snippets for critical commentary or to incorporate into your newest rap parody, and you have not been authorized to use it as the data source for a visual transformation engine. Ergo, using a visualizer is a copyright violation.
Further -- if we, again, are to regard the media companies' view as legitimate -- the images resulting from a particular CD played through a visualizer constitute a derivative work, since they are derived directly from the original copyrighted musical work. As such, the specific visual presentation also falls under the media conglomerate's copyright. When you bought the CD, you only obtained a license to listen to it; therefore, the resulting derivative images covered by the same copyright require a separate license which you don't have. Ergo, watching the visualizer is a copyright violation.
Reductio Ad Absurdum? I'd desperately like to think so. However, recent court cases concerning intellectual "property" make me very, very worried that we are perilously close to such absurdity.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Nobody wins and nobody looses.
This is not a game - it is life.
I have got ASS.
--
Raphael Wegmann
Raphael Wegmann
wegmann@psi.co.at
Did anyone else besides me first think this was about that '70s era Japanese animation about the five kids that flew in a blue spaceship which could turn into a phoenix?
Bummer. I wish they'd bring that back.
Tripex   For the goatse.cx weary, its http://www.tripex.co.uk
A great plugin, I love it.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
I don't know if Jeff Minter was behind it, but I have an Atari Video Music from the 70s that's very trippy.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It's not a bad thing to empty your mind
My favorite vis plugin is AcidSpunk (WinAmp and Sonique versions exist). In my experience, it's shown significantly less repitition in visual patterns, and it's -much- better than WhiteCap, Geiss, or any other vis plugins I've tried at fitting appropriate images to music - it really does explode at the climax of a song, and so on.
Just my $(2x10**-2)
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Why couldn't he use a different name for his pluggin? I saw the story, and my first thought was that it had something to do with some Nvidia product. It's as moronic as naming your home grown video codec Divx when it was also the name of a lame system for renting movies.
If you can't come up with something that sounds cool, just pull some word out of your ass like Intel does (Itanium), but try to be a little unique.
Guess this is why we have trademark laws.
"Sure, we all did acid back in the sixties"
uhuh.. who is this "we"? IIRC, "we" also did acid in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and I'll be damned if I dont hear my college friends saying "we all do acid nowadays".. not to mention the big E, peyote, marijuana (even though to tell the truth I never felt any psychodelic effects from pot), and so on..
So before you start preaching about what "we" did and what "our children" shouldn't be doing, at least give credit were credit is due..
And isn't it funny that what "we" used to do for fun, peer pressure, etc.. is what we want our kids *not* to do, just like our parents didn't want us to do those "evil drugs" and just like their parents didn't want them drinking that "evil alcohol" and so on, ad infinitum..
Now I'm one to say that drugs are bad <smirk> and that they'll damage your brains <smile> but what, exactly, do you think your kids are gonna do when you say "dont do it"?
I think you know the answer to that, since "we" all did exactly the same thing when our parents told us not to...
my $0.02
------ Poo-tee-weet?
http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id =1690
left out a trailing zero...
Hmmm... Wasn't Jeff Minter the first guy to really really really do this stuff on home computers? Yet there's no mention of ColorSpace, Trip-a-Tron, Virtual Light Machine, or any of the other things he's done.
Mind you he wasn't the first person to do this kind o' thing - Walt Disney gets that credit for Fantasia.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Well, Hemos saw fit to mention XMMS in the blurb, leading me to believe that GForce is actually available for XMMS or that even XMMS is mentioned in the article.
Nope, not even a mention of XMMS (or Linux, or UNIX) in the article or on his site.
Thanks for getting my hopes up!
Nutmeg itself isn't all that great but if you really want to flip out, take about 20 grams (yes, that's a lot) and stuff them in horse capsules and swallow all of them. After you start feeling a little drowsy, take a few hits of acid. You'll peak for about 10 hours and trip for about another 24-36 hours. It's weird, after 12-24 hours, you can actually sleep and then wake up still tripping.
Nutmeg actually has some of the precursors to making MDMA (ecstasy). It's related in a lot of ways to the same benzene ring family that most psychedelic amphetamines come from including Peyote (yes, peyote is a psychedelic amphetamine).
If you really want more information, check out this book by Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL (Phenethylamine I Have Known and Loved). Alexander Shulgin has probably synthesized and tested more psychedelics than any other chemist.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
siri
I have one those as well - I picked mine up at a "fill this bag for a dollar" yard sale - managed to get both it and an 80's cd player in the bag. The cd player didn't work - but the Video Music did. One of the knobs was cracked on the part that grabs the shaft of one of the potentiometers, but that was easily fixed with superglue.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
>> Note that O'Meara says his deal with Apple convinced him he could make a living as a programmer, but now he talks more like he's forced to cease all development of GForce now that he's on active duty, and he's "profoundly depressed." <<
Yeah, poor baby. He signed a contract so the US Navy would pay his way through college and now he's upset that they actually want him to hold up his end of the bargain. The guy produces some truly spectacular stuff, but all his moaning about how he's getting screwed just makes him sound like a crybaby. Personally, I think the Navy's getting screwed.
This is wildly off-topic, but the poll says no such thing. The poll says that 8% of voters think that Lieberman's religion made him a worse candidate, and of those 8%, 72% voted for Bush.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I'd like to learn how to make these things, but for now, my solidering expertise sucks, and I'm not that good at constructing little electronic devices, so making one on my own isn't an option right now. I'll pay money for one of those things!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I'm assuming the link is wrong?...'cause a brief skim of the article didn't seem to have anything to do with visualisation plugins...
Advanced users are users too!
I tired ALL the xmms visualisation plugins last month. Here is the low-down, with some random notes I made at the time. Hope this is useful for someone.
...
:-(. BUG: closing window kills XMMS. Try DGA patch ?? Needs very latest 'make' to compile
# Bezier - Boring, crashes.
# Blur scope max. Promising, fixed res, slow, hangs XMMS sometimes. Config is also slow
# Blursk. Very Nice. Bug: Need to restart if resized.
# Bump scope. OK. Bump mapped scope with moving light. Can run "full screen on play" but assmues geometry nd breaks X a bit.
# Synastehsia-xmms. V nice. Same "full screen on play" problem as Bump scope.
# Emmisions. libxstars is kinda OK, maybe hack it a bit. Runs on root window!
# G-force. Good. Scales well. Config text goes to screen
# Infinite. Nice circle based scope thingy. Good, stable. Scaling a problem.
# Iris. Most strange, quite good. Stable, good config tool.
# Goom. Nice. Resolution config a bit buggy? Doesn't run fullscreen. Closing the window breaks it.
# Jess. Nice, wierd effects. Crashes on start? Enable button broken? Fixed res. Worth a look at code. Apparently color-cyclable (press return. Perhaps this should be in a config window).
# Nurbies. Not sure what this does, but the GL stuff crashes my XMMS. Makefile is broken - 'libdir' is hard coded. Try this on a GL box.
# Plazma. Fairly simple colour stuff (turn the scope off). Has promise. Crashes XMMS hard if window closed.
# Rainbow. Very boring coloured rectangles. Makefile broken as for nurbies (same guy)
# Neato. Broken install.
# Tazma. Depedency farce (OpenPTC, hermes, lots of other broken graphics stuff).
# WMDiscoTux. "Dancing" penguin (nods head and flaps feet). A bit shit really.
# Xmms-speakers. Broken Makefile (libdir). Puts speakers on your XMMS. Crap.
# XPLSISNJASP. Control h/w via parallel port. Promising but untried. Could be crap.
# Zon. Won't compile.
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
There's a company in Canada making a PS2 product that has a lot of visualization stuff in it (yes, I work for them altho not on this product). http://mgi.moderngroove.com
Also as a related note, I didn't see if anyone answered but most of the traditional wavelength vis. programs use integer math instead of floating point (a la geiss) so you're mostly stuck with raw clock speed and a fast 2d RAMDAC to get performance out of them. It might mean that a thunderbird will spank an equivalent p4 (this is all very broad speculation).
The correct URL for the story is: http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id =1690
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I'm surprised that article didn't mention O'Meara's recent deal with Apple. G-Force is the default (and, currently, the only) viz plugin for iTunes (which is especially weird since there were many viz plugins for SoundJam, from which iTunes is derived). Anyways, O'Meara must be doing well from this deal - at least, I hope he is.
:)
On a side note, something that I think would be interesting (though I don't know how possible) would be a visualizer that used some of the algorithms that have been developed for musical comparison (the same sort of algorithms that are being used to identify mp3s of copyrighted songs, for example). Looking at the structure of the music, rather than just a spectrum analysis, might allow some really cool visualizers
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Back in the 60s? I wasn't even alive then. Hell, I did acid in 2000, and I'm still happily sitting at my desk all day browsing the web and making 6 figures. I don't know what you want your kids to be, but my life isn't all that bad, considerring how messed the country is at the moment.
How is it a druggy like myself can do better than 50% of the country? I would almost be willing to argue that the psychodelics gave me a more clear perception of reality, since they allowed me to experience surreality in its purest form. But I wouldn't recommend anyone do psychodelics if they don't know themselves through and through. If you have any emotional problems, relationship problems, life problems, etc. then don't do drugs because they only make those problems worse.
P.S. I also have written a lot of deltafields, colormaps and editted a few particles and waveforms for G-Force. That program kicks ass and can do some amazing things. Its unfortunate that Andy doesn't want to continue work on it. But in my opinion G-Force 2.0 is a finished product.
Don't let this article distract you from the license. Always remember to read the license. G-Force is not GPLed code. It is open source and legal to view and use for your own personal pleasure, but you can not publicly display it.
As far as I can tell from the site, G-Force does not provide support for XMMS *at all*. In fact, it does not even run under Linux at all, only under Windows and Mac.
I'm sure it's just that you needed to pad out the story there, but at least make up something that doesn't directly contradict something that's on the guys' site.
I wondered why this looked so familar then I realized Wired also had a story not too long ago about the dude as well.Geiss is also another great WinAMP visualization plugin as well.
Backyard Boxing online?That's unpossible!
ICQ:47685501
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
salvia man! try it :)
I ate my sig.
Some legal phsycedelics Nutmeg Peyote (in some cases) Mushrooms ummm...maybe mroe I don't know.
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A friend of mine found out that Clary Sage oil had psychadelic properties when combined with alcohol, so he slipped some to another friend of mine when he was knackered. Friend B had a great conversation with a little green man, but later when he and I (friend B that is) tried to reproduce the effects it just tasted fscking disgusting. The alcohol still got us quite drunk tough.
You didn't take enough. Take 15-18 drops on honey oil(liquid hash). First time I did that, I experienced "pure vision". That's seeing without perspective(sp?), but it took about 3-4 hours to came down from the high.(usally, 1-2 hours and i'm good).
Whoa, I've never saw pinwheels and kaleidoscopic visions on pot, but on shrooms, try to look at yourself in a mirror. It's too fucking weird, like kaleidoscopic vision like but with an organic glow. But shrooms makes my tummy hurt.
I knew a guy that used to have some box that (if I remember correctly) output it's own weird sound sequence for headphones and had blacked-out glasses with LEDs mounted in them that flashed in all sorts of patterns. I think it was supposed to be a relaxation device.
Now if someone would build blinking LED sunglasses into a portable MP3 player (or as an addon), we'd be set.
My favorite WinAmp plugin has to be the Christmas Dancer. Bar none.
"Population 1,656"
That's one of the ones that I was specifically thinking of... Of course, there are hundreds of others.
Belladonna is another one, that is also quite common growing ditchside in the continental United States. Of course, Belladonna has nasty side effects such as: /dev/vagus
chmod ugo-rwx
I don't think that any music visualization software yet devised can shut down any of the cranial nerves, but who knows?
sorry to all you Slashdotters who are getting distracted by our little sub-thread
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
First, the term psychedelic doesn't really mean anything, and it is pretty hard to define what exactly a psychedelic is.
That being said, there are plenty of legal 'psychedelics' although that doesn't mean that they are exactly safe or to everyone's taste.
There are about several million different species of plants, most crawling with various alkaloids, glycosides, aromatic oils, etc. Somewhere in some of them are psychedelic compounds. You just have to know where to look.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
This seemed to be an appropriate place to ask all the posters out there... What hardware is good at handling plugins for *amp with high framerates. I have a killer machine with 256 megs of RAM and a PIII 800mhz... and perhaps the most important part I have a GeForce 2 GTS w/32 megs. Even with all these goodies at resolutions above 800x600 (and even there) the framerates are terribly low for winamp AVS and wildtanget apps. I was wondering if anyone out there had framerates 50 fps+ on these plugins. Any ideas... could I hype somepart of my system up for this somehow... help.
#set prompt = $user.$group @ `hostname -s`#
root.wheel @ reality#
Remove *your pants* to send me email.
Even if that poll result is accurate, it doesn't have to mean that it's an anti-Semetism thing. Lieberman is a very devout man, and there are a lot of people who don't want a "holy roller" of ANY type in office. I wouldn't vote for Lieberman or anyone else with religious convictions as strong as his, no matter what the specific religion was. Moderation in all things...
Can I just say that this is at best a double-edged sword and at worst is downright dangerous!
At best, you are trying to use the state of someone's mind as a clue for the most appropriate way to represent the flow and feel of the music. This is fine when the listener is in a happy mood and listening to a happy song. But! What if they are in a sad mood and trying to cheer themselves up by listening to a happy song?! Is the visualiser going to sense the "unhappy" characteristics of their brain and render their effervescent dance track in sombre blues and browns? What about a song like "Blue" by Eiffel 65, which has fairly sad lyrics if you ever read them, yet the whole song is presented in a really happy and bouncy way. Definitely some ambiguity there - and difficult to see how meaningful the visualiser would be.
At worst, you've got a situation where the visualiser output is interpreted by the brain, which supplies info to the visualiser which sends back into the brain and pretty soon you've got a potentially nasty feedback loop happening! Not a good situation to be in if you're listening to heavy metal or a particularly disturbing Eminem song!
The moral of the story? - Keep It Simple Stupid! :-D
Besides, I have enough trouble stopping evil corporations from controlling my thoughts, let alone a psychic WinAmp!
-OzJuggler.
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
Here's a link to andy's home page check it out. Keep up the good work Andy!
-vm
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get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
experimenting with neurofeedback devices that measure brain waves themselves, and translate them into computer-generated images and sounds
From what I have heard, feedback loops using brainwaves to create patterns (audio or visual) can cause an epileptic fit..
Staring at Geforce for long periods of time if photoepiliptic, can be a bad idea, although to know if you are susceptible to such things, it is good to find out when sitting down, not when e.g. driving down tree-lined avenue on sunny day - another common photoepileptic trigger).
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
What I'd really love would be a visualization engine on a memory card for the PSX or PS2. Then I wouldn't need an extra computer just to play tuns and run visualization on my TV.
not only can we not spell here at /., we are unable to interpret statistics as well.
Where are the grammar and stats nerds around here?
Whoops! I trolled again!
!-- wit --!
For the naive among you, this isn't better than acid. However, it certainly is better on acid.
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
someone mentions that the link is wrong, and you guys mark it offtopic. god, you all fucking rock. i tell you kids, you fucking rock.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
With the exit polls dancing to the spaced out '60s rock, all I need to complete the picture are some 'shrooms, and to wake up tomorrow and have someone tell me that George Junior winning was just a bad trip.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
well maybe AcidSpunk is cool, i don't know, but WhiteCap certainly kicks somes ass! And from what I've read was one of the original vis plug-ins. Way better name in any case. -mantis
Unfortunately, like psychadilics, good visualizations have a tendency to keep you and anyone else in proximity drooling at the screen, trasfixied and zombified. I lost many years of my life that way.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
And unlike psydelics, it's legal.
I don't think we should joke about illegal narcotics. Sure, we all did acid back in the sixties, everybody was doing it. However, in the current age of zero tolerance, I don't want my child using drugs or staring at a computer screen full of crazy swirling colors!
"If the Lord had meant for us to fly, He'd have given us wings with which to soar...." William, 14:35