Are there any visualisation plugins for winamp (or other windows based mp3 players) suited for ambient music? posted by noisia to (3 comments total)
It seems as though the majority of vis plugins are for far more active music with large repetitive beats, or at least beats in general. Also, they seem to be geared towards faster music, with the speed of transitions between presets. They've got the two to five minute pop/dance track in mind. Some plugins are almost passable, like geiss (and geiss 2), or milkdrop, but even these have a frantic pace that doesn't really work when a track's ten or twenty minutes long, has no beat, is extremely quiet, and develops slowly. I think TripX claims to be good with ambient, but it doesn't seem that way to me. I've tried the majority of the popular plugins, but nothing works well. Ideally the vis would evolve slowly without constant shifts in presets. The most satisfying plugin for ambient (especially the more obviously electronic stuff) I've used is not even a visualisation, but the spectrum dsp plugin but it falls short in quite a few ways. It's not fullscreen, there's no option for even making it horizontal, there's only a tiny amount of customisation for the sonogram colours, and it's certainly not all that visually interesting or dynamic, but it's the closest I've seen anything get to reflecting the tone of ambient. I'm not tied to winamp, if there's a better plugin for another program. Maybe even something from the huge and daunting catalogue of AVS presets, if that's all there is. I'm afraid that the vis plugin community has stagnated. Examples of the sort of music I'm thinking of: Eno's Ambient albums (obviously), Biosphere, Vincent Gallo, Casino vs Japan, Oval, RDJ's SAW II, even Godspeed You Black Emperor. That sort of thing. There's the Bliss Paint program, but it's for mac and more hands-on than I want. posted by noisia at 1:06 PM on March 30, 2004
have you tried smoke, from ryan geiss? searching for "ambient" in their plug-ins section comes up with this.
if neither of those links help you, try heading over to the AVS section of the winamp forums. there's not that much activity there, but i'm sure you'll be able to eventually find someone who can help you, and the moderators are usually very friendly. though i can't really speak for WMP, most of the other media players (qcd, foobar, itunes) have a poop selection of AVS's. posted by lotsofno at 1:41 PM on March 30, 2004
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posted by noisia at 1:06 PM on March 30, 2004