As I’ve ended up with de facto maintainership of the illustrious projectM open source music visualizer I’ve seen a fair bit of interest in the project. I think I at least owe a blog post to update folks on where it’s at, what needs working on, and how to help make it better.

 

What is projectM?

projectM is a music visualizer program. In short it makes cool animations that are synchronized and reactive to any music input. I say music and not audio because it includes beat detection for making interesting things happen on the beat.

History

Some of you may remember the old windows mp3 player WinAmp. It contained a supremely amazing and innovative music visualizer called Milkdrop written by a gentleman from nVidia named Ryan Geiss, known just as Geiss. The visualizer was not a single set of rules for visualizing audio but rather a mathematical interpreter that would read in “preset” files which were sets of equations. You can read the very illuminating description here of how the files are defined if you’re interested. In short there is a set of per-frame equations describing colors and FFT waveforms and simple transformations, and there is a set of per-vertex equations for more detailed transformations and deformations.

Due to the popularity of WinAmp and Milkdrop there have been many thousands of presets authored and shared with really stunning and innovative visual effects ranging from animated fractals to dancing stick figures to bizarre abstract soups. The files are often named things like:

• shifter – cellular_Phat_YAK_Infusion_v2.milk
• [dylan] cube in a room -no effects – code is very messy nz+ finally some serious stfu (loavthe).milk
• NeW Adam Master Mashup FX 2 Zylot – In death there is life (Dancing Lights mix)+ Tumbling Cubes 3d.milk
• suksma + aderassi geiss – the sick assumptions you make about my car [shifter’s esc shader] nz+.milk
• flexi + cope – i blew you a soap bubble now what – feel the projection you are, connected to it all nz+ wrepwrimindloss w8.milk

And so on.

As I understand it, possibly incorrectly, there were two major problems with Milkdrop. First that it was implemented with DirectX, win32 APIs and assembler, and secondly that it was not open source (though it was made open source fairly recently). So some enterprising folks in 2003 created projectM as an open source reimplementation that would be Milkdrop preset-compatible.

I didn’t work on projectM originally and I am not responsible for the vast majority of it. However the previous authors and contributors have for whatever reason mostly abandoned the project so it was left to random people to make it work. The code is quite old although the core Milkdrop preset parsing, beat detection, most of the OpenGL (more on that later) calls, and rendering is in fine shape. projectM is really just a library though, designed to be used by applications. In the past there have been XMMS and VLC plugins, a Qt application, pulseaudio and jack-based applications, and more.

 

OSX iTunes Plugin

Not really having a good solution for OSX I went ahead and ported the ancient iTunes visualizer code to work on a then-modern version of iTunes and voila! projectM on OSX. Though I did have to deal with the very unfortunate Objective-C++ “language” to make it work. Not Objective-C, Objective-C++. No I didn’t know that existed either.

I tried to submit the plugin to the Mac App store as a free download. Not to make money or anything, just to make it easy for people to get it. The unpleasantness of this experience with Apple and their rejection is actually what spurred me to start this blog so I could complain about it.

Much to my, and apparently a number of other people’s dismay, a very recent version of iTunes or macOS caused the iTunes visualizer to stop working as well as it did. It appears to be related to drawing and subviews in the plugin.

 

Cross-Platform Standalone Application

I decided that what would be better is a cross-platform standalone application that simply listens to audio input and visualizes it. This dream was made possible by a very recent addition to the venerable cross-platform libsdl2 media library adding support for audio capture. I quickly hacked together a passable but very basic SDL2-based application that runs on Linux and macOS and in theory windows and other platforms as well. Some work needs to be done to add key commands, text overlays (preset name, help, etc), better fullscreen support and easy selection of which audio input device to use.

The main application code demonstrates how simple libprojectM is to use. All one must do is set up an OpenGL rendering context, set some configuration settings, and start feeding in audio PCM data to the projectM instance. It automatically performs beat detection and drawing to the current OpenGL context. It’s really ideal for being integrated into other applications and I hope people continue to do so.

You can obtain source, OSX and linux builds from the releases page. This is super crappy and experimental and needed some configuration tuning to make it look good, and you need to drop the presets folder in. But it’s a start.

Build System

In their infinite wisdom the original authors chose the cmake build system. After wasting many hours of my life I will not get back and almost giving up on the software profession altogether I decided it would be easier to switch to GNU autotools, the same build system almost all other open source projects use, than to deal with cmake’s bullshit. So now it uses autotools (aka the “./configure && make && make install” system everyone knows and loves).

 

Needed Efforts

This is where you come in. If you like music visualizers and want to help the software achieve greater things there is some work to be done modernizing it.

The most important task by far is getting rid of the OpenGL immediate-mode calls and replacing them with vertex buffer object instructions. VBO is a “new” (not new at all) way of doing things that involves creating a chunk of memory containing vertices and pushing it to the GPU so it can decide how and when to render your triangles. The old-school way was “immediate mode” where you would tell OpenGL things like glBegin(GL_QUADS) (“I’m going to give you a sequence of vertices for quadrilaterals”) and give it vertices one at a time. This is tremendously inefficient and slow so it isn’t supported on the newer OpenGL ES which is what any embedded device (like a phone or raspberry pi) supports, as well as WebGL.

I believe that projectM would be most awesome as a hardware device with an audio input and an HDMI output, but making a reasonably-sized and -priced solution would mean using an embedded device. It would be great to have a web application (I attempted to do this with Emscripten, a JavaScript backend for llvm) but that requires WebGL. Having an open source app for Android and iOS would be amazing. All of this requires the small number of existing immediate-mode calls to be updated to use VBOs instead. Somebody who knows more about this stuff or has more time than me should do it. There aren’t a lot of places in the code where they are used; see this document.

Astute readers may note that there already are iOS and Android projectM apps. They are made by one of the old developers who has made the decision to not share his modern OpenGL modifications with the project because he makes money off of them.

Another similar effort is to replace the very old dependency on the nVidia Cg framework for enabling shaders. Cg was used because it matches Directx’s shader syntax. GLSL, the standard OpenGL shader language is not the same, and requires manual conversion of the shaders in each preset.

The Cg framework has been deprecated and unsupported for many years and work needs to be done to use the built-in GLSL compilation calls instead of Cg and convert the preset shaders. I already did some work on this but it’s far from finished.

 

The Community

The reason I’m writing this blog post is because of the community interest in the project. People do send pull requests and file issues, and we definitely could use more folks involved. I am busy with work and can’t spend time on it right now but I’m more than happy to guide and help out anyone wishing to contribute. We got an official IRC channel on irc.freenode.net #projectm so feel free to hang around there and ask any questions you have. Or just start making changes and send PRs.