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(By the way, does it bother anybody else that we have "retro" music
which is actually nothing like the way old music used to sound, and yet
it sounds old somehow? Or movies like The Incredibles which depict a
world which is clearly in the past, yet somehow more futuristic than our
own time? Weird...)
I just spent an hour listening to the grainy sound of Jesus on E's while
watching the video output of WinAmp's Advanced Visualisation System.
(For anybody who's been living under a rock, AVS is basically a
user-programmable visualisation kit. It's actually fairly primitive, yet
hackers manage to make it do astonishing stuff...)
Your typical AVS preset is a psychedalic technicolour rainbow of
swirling, pulsating colours, oscilating geometric shapes, kalidescopic
patterns, and improbable spacial transformations - all of which
complement rave music quite well. (I imagine it would work for pretty
much any kind of EDM.)
It's kind of amusing, watching my 2.2 GHz dual-core 64-bit processor
real-time decoding a modified discrete Fourier transform of the sound
waves generated by an Amiga 1200 with an 8 MHz 32-bit processor
controlling a simple 4-channel, 8-bit sample replay unit. And watching
the said processor also generating psychoscopic visuals the like of
which would have been fantasy back in the days when Jesus on E's was
produced.
(In case you haven't seen it, the demo features pixelated osciliscopes,
grainy black and white video loops, pixel-painted logos such as ravens,
skulls, etc. and a few trivial video effects. The video sucks
graphically, even for its time. The impressive part is the music.)
Of course, AVS has a few annoying features. Aside from the bugginess and
the random crashes that you generally expect from WinAmp itself, it's
clearly written by hackers rather than engineers. Bugs include:
- Switching into or out of fullscreen mode takes about 20 seconds.
- Some effects work on pixel size, while others work on image size. So
for a non-square image (e.g., fullscreen mode), certain effects come out
in the wrong aspect ratio. And there's no way to fix this, short of
editing the each individual preset to compensate for it. (It can be
done, but not everybody does it...)
- There's no way to control the frame rate. The video renders "as fast
as possible". So how many FPS you get depends only on the complexity of
the preset and the requested video options. One preset crawls along like
treacle, while another is too fast to see.
- When crossfading between two presets, the whole system slows down to
half speed (as you'd expect, given the above).
- Switching out of fullscreen mode screws up the windowed graphics until
you restart AVS. (Fortunately restarting WinAmp itself isn't required.)
- Documentation? What documentation?
Some day I must sit down and write myself my own AVS replacement...
(Also, I can't help thinking that the vast majority of stuff AVS does
ought to be trivial on the GPU. The CPU can't keep up with most presents.)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (By the way, does it bother anybody else that we have "retro" music
> which is actually nothing like the way old music used to sound, and yet
> it sounds old somehow? Or movies like The Incredibles which depict a
> world which is clearly in the past, yet somehow more futuristic than our
> own time? Weird...)
The setting of _the Incredibles_ was intended to mimic what people in
the 50's and 60's thought the future would be like.
Regards,
John
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (Also, I can't help thinking that the vast majority of stuff AVS does
> ought to be trivial on the GPU. The CPU can't keep up with most presents.)
Milk Drop already does (roughly) the same thing as AVS, but uses the GPU
instead. I've been playing with it recently. Some of the visual effects
defy explanation...
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