fling93 loves fishies

iTunes visualizations & G-Force

One of the cool things about iTunes is the truly trippy visualizations, especially in full-screen mode (and the “Tripping Hard” effect, of course). Some music-snob purists might object to needing any visual accompaniment for music, but I personally find it easier to concentrate on the music when viewing a visualizer, since I’m otherwise easily distracted by other things (the visualization, on the other hand, reinforces the music). Plus, it’s just way cool.

You may or may not be aware that it responds to keyboard input. While the visualization is running, you can hit ‘H’ to bring up the Help menu, from which you have a surprising number of options. The important ones involve the various configurations, namely the waveforms, effects, and color schemes (the combination of which make up what you see). You can use keys to cycle through them manually or switch to a different random configuration. Plus, if you see a particularly interesting combination, you can map it to a key to call it up later. Several cheat-sheets for all these options are available here and a more updated one here.

But there’s more to the story than that.

The more observant among you probably recognize the iTunes visualization as merely a crippled version of Andy O’Meara’s G-Force visualization plugin available for a variety of media players, including Winamp (the one I personally use when on Windows), Windows Media Player, Musicmatch Jukebox, Sonique, and, of course, iTunes. Indeed, I think the two most popular visualization plugins for Winamp are G-Force and MilkDrop (which, unfortunately, works only with Winamp—indeed, I think it comes standard with it nowadays). Although MilkDrop definitely looks prettier, G-Force seems to provide a wider variety of looks and has the big plus of not requiring any 3D graphics hardware (which, yeah, means more CPU time, but I’ve never had a problem with it).

So why does the iTunes visualization look just like G-Force? Don’t worry, Apple didn’t rip him off. They worked out a deal with Andy (much like they did with Casady & Greene for the technology behind SoundJam MP, which iTunes was derived from). And his full G-Force visualization remains a far, far superior visualization to the iTunes default one. There are a lot more waveforms, effects, and color maps available, so you’ll be constantly surprised with what you see, instead of recognizing the same effects over and over again. In addition, it will also occasionally display eye-catching sprites (moving image objects) and particle effects.

You can even supply your own image files to be used as sprites and backgrounds and specify parameters to create your own particle effects and waveforms. Unfortunately for the less technically minded, configuration involves editing text files (which can be cryptic), and the documentation is pretty sketchy, relying mostly upon the commenting in those text files. However, the default settings are perfectly fine, so you probably won’t need to mess with them anyway (although I personally prefer increasing the frequency of color map changes a bit).

Of course, it’s shareware, costing $10 to register, but I think you’ll find it well worth the cost. The displays are truly breath-taking and mind-blowing (and, indeed, go quite well with other… um… mind-blowing things). The screenshots can give you a flavor of it, but really don’t do it justice. There’s a free demo version you can try, and I’m sure you won’t go back. It’s actually fully functional, only occasionally displaying some registration nag text over the visualizations (of course, it displays it as a sprite, and in the version I demo’ed a while back, you could immediately get rid of it via the ‘K’ key—something I wish you could do with the Apple logo in the default iTunes visualization).

If you pay the $10 to upgrade to the Gold version, you get 35 more effects as well as the added feature of displaying cover art (something added in a recent version which had been sorely missing). Plus, registering shareware is just the right thing to do. If you find a program so valuable that you use it regularly, it’s only fair to pay the person who worked so hard to create and debug it. Otherwise it’s stealing, just like downloading music off of KaZaA.

Of course, I’m a software engineer, so if you really have to make the choice between ripping off musicians or programmers, go ahead and rip off the musicians!