Visualisation

Everyone’s itunes does it.
you get massive visualisations at gigs.
im experimenting in proper visuals for my gigs – I play ableton in a band.
I have yet to find a visualisation program that takes input from your soundcard and generates the visualisations based on whats coming into that input. I suppose ill have to make my own – or find a way to make winamp ‘listen’ to the mic port – then I can have a machine thats dedicated to running visualisations, and then I can use my laptop to focus on the music.
If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, then help would be most welcome!
I have attached a little video that I made to see if my machine can handle rendering the visualisation and recording it – It cant =|

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. mediapathic

    I actually do this for a living ;>

    So, if you were on a mac, there’s a piece of software called “Soundflowerbed” that basically routes the sound internally. It’s not available for windows, but there may be an equivalent thing there. When I was on a windows machine, I never tried to route the sound internally. Two things occur to me: you can do what I do and use the microphone on the computer (which works just fine in a loud band/ club situation) to drive the audio. Or, what I would probably suggest looking into, is since you’re using ableton, you could just find a piece of visual software that takes midi input (most of the ones designed for vjs do) and feed it that direct from ableton. You won’t get the nifty soundwave kind of stuff, but you can very easily synchro video events with changes in the music.

    I’d recommend looking at Resolume for windows, that was the first software I was using when I started doing this. If you get really crazy and want to do insanely cool shit that requires a lot more effort to build (that can run off both midi and audio effects, btw), look into vvvv.

    if you have specific questions, feel free to drop me an email.
    (btw, I found this because I follow you on twitter, I’m pvck there)

  2. mediapathic

    oh, and, btw, if you decide to go the internal midi route, midi-ox is the shit. Just so you know.

    Good luck!

  3. jonathan

    yeah, I had a look at vvvv – it looks insane!
    the reason that im looking for something that takes sound from a line in is so that I can have one machine to do the video and one to do the audio – though I could link them up with midi to control that kind of stuff too =)

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