New iTunes Visualizers in Leopard

[Wayfarer]

Ah, some Core Animation at work! This is a sign of more great things to come.

 

[arn]

Side note, when I hit the F key while the visualizer is on, a very small number in the far bottom left hand corner appears, and changes rapidly between 29-31. Don't know what that is. Any thoughts?

FPS (Frames per second)

arn

 

[cal6n]

Yup. They play in full screen mode. The first one, lathe, looks like it responds primarily to the bass in the song like a subwoofer and seems to take place ina doomed like room. The last one, stix, is pretty cool, especially as it reflects off a mirrored floor like coverflow.

Side note, when I hit the F key while the visualizer is on, a very small number in the far bottom left hand corner appears, and changes rapidly between 29-31. Don't know what that is. Any thoughts?

"F" is for "Frame Rate"

 

[3282872]

"F" is for "Frame Rate"

DOLT thanks!

 

[atp]

New iTunes Visualizers in Leopard

Cool, new Mac OS 10.5. New icons, desktop pictures and iTunes visualizers.

 

[motulist]

[the visualizer's frame rate] changes rapidly between 29-31... Any thoughts?

Do you have the iTunes visualizer frame rate preference set to cap the frame rate at 30 frames per second? Or is it just that you're running older hardware and it's just coincidental that it happens to be maxing out at 30 fps? Because higher frame rates really do make the visualizer look smoother and more trippy.

 

[ppdix]

Dual Screens

I hope they are smart enough to make them work on multiple monitors. The current visualizer only works on the main screen where the menu bar is.

 

[motulist]

I hope they are smart enough to make them work on multiple monitors. The current visualizer only works on the main screen where the menu bar is.

No, I believe there's a way to change that. iirc, all you have to do is drag the less-than-full-screen visualizer window over to the second monitor, then select to go full screen and it'll be on the 2nd monitor. (I know there's a way to do it, but the method I described above is iirc)

edit: or maybe I just did it by turning on mirrored desktop.

 

[daneoni]

i hate Leopard.

 

[voidptr]

There's this cool app called Quartz Composer in the current developer tools. You can make amazing animations that play in QuickTime Player and as screen savers in the current OS. They can even sense inputs such as audio and react to them. You can find websites full of these compositions now. Wouldn't it be cool if such compositions could hook into iTunes somehow, someday? Just speculatin'

It's called iVisualize, and it's been around for a while:
http://web.mac.com/vogelbusch/Site/iVisualize.html

 

[twoodcc]

i hate Leopard.

don't say such things

 

[72930]

i hate Leopard.

Care to expand on that?

 

[Genghis Khan]

core animation

can't wait to see what else apple can do with it

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Woooooo. iTunes visualizers.

Just give us Leopard already. Enough with the cheap parlor tricks.

 

[ariza910]

There's this cool app called Quartz Composer in the current developer tools. You can make amazing animations that play in QuickTime Player and as screen savers in the current OS. They can even sense inputs such as audio and react to them. You can find websites full of these compositions now. Wouldn't it be cool if such compositions could hook into iTunes somehow, someday? Just speculatin'

The Soundstream screen saver is one of my favorite screensavers in OSX becuase it reacts with sound input. Pretty sure it was created with Quartz Composer - works well in OSX 10.3 and up

http://www.pcheese.net/software/soundstream/

 

[bug67]

Side note, when I hit the F key while the visualizer is on, a very small number in the far bottom left hand corner appears, and changes rapidly between 29-31. Don't know what that is. Any thoughts?

Frame rate.

 

[Malarkey]

New Visualizers -- It's About Time

The default visualizer that comes with the current/recent version(s) of iTunes is horrible. It may have been cool in 1996, but...

For a really cool music visualizer, try the one that comes with the Xbox 360. Even the one that came with the original Playstation was more interesting than Apple's. And both the gaming consoles let you tweak it as it was playing. Why doesn't Apple have something like that?

 

[3282872]

Do you have the iTunes visualizer frame rate preference set to cap the frame rate at 30 frames per second? Or is it just that you're running older hardware and it's just coincidental that it happens to be maxing out at 30 fps? Because higher frame rates really do make the visualizer look smoother and more trippy.

I'n running Leopard 9A599 on a Mac Pro 2.66 with 8 GB RAM, so I hope it's not my system as it should be more than capable in running a visualizer in iTunes. I noticed it was a bit choppy. I wonder why...

 

[matthewHUB]

Is it just me or does anyone else not use vizualisations? i can't stand them! what exactly is the point for them? You listen to music either while you're doing something on your computer or away from your computer... so why stare at a screen of junk?

M

 

[HLdan]

With Microsoft it's completely reversed, their Mac market share is so low compared to their PC market share, they don't want to put all the effort into developing Mac software. Look what happened in the case of Media Player, as soon as someone made something that did the same thing, MS dropped Media Player and officially supported Flip4Mac.

I still fail to see any reason Apple should make Mac-Only features in iTunes, they have enough Mac-Only stuff with iLife.

Okay, you sound like more like a PC user because that's the type of defensive answer a PC user would give. If you were a true Mac user (and I don't mean using a Mac to run Windows and occasionally playing around with OS X) you would understand.
Leopard will be big and with marketshare for the Mac being small how do you expect Apple to get Windows users to switch if Apple gives all their proprietary software to Windows with the exact same features as the Mac and expect people to look the Mac way, it just doesn't happen.

I have co-workers tell me all the time, "I would have switched to the Mac but now Apple has given us some of their software I don't need to".

One of the reasons we are still sorta tethered to Windows is because Microsoft has dominated and dumbed down the Mac software making it useless for Mac users.
It would be a great business practice for Apple's iTunes, Quicktime and Safari to have Mac only features.

 

[motulist]

I'n running Leopard 9A599 on a Mac Pro 2.66 with 8 GB RAM, so I hope it's not my system as it should be more than capable in running a visualizer in iTunes. I noticed it was a bit choppy. I wonder why...

In iTunes go view > visualizer > options, then make sure "cap frame rate at 30 fps" is unchecked. If that doesn't work then try checking and or unchecking the "Use OpenGL" option. If that doesn't work then open up activity monitor, make sure it's set to show all processes, and see if any processes are stealing a lot of your cpu power. If none of that works then you can check off the "faster but rougher display option" in the visualizer prefs.

But unless you're running a very high resolution monitor, there's absolutely no reason why your computer shouldn't be able to do a high frame rate with all the bells and whistles. If you aren't able to get a good frame rate on an average sized monitor then I'd interpret that as a symptom of a larger problem and or a major loss of computing power somewhere. Are all your cpu cores appearing in your utilities?

Edit: I just saw you're using a leopard beta. Maybe the relevant system components just haven't had their final optimizations done yet.

 

[3282872]

In iTunes go view > visualizer > options, then make sure "cap frame rate at 30 fps" is unchecked. If that doesn't work then try checking and or unchecking the "Use OpenGL" option. If that doesn't work then open up activity monitor, make sure it's set to show all processes, and see if any processes are stealing a lot of your cpu power. If none of that works then you can check off the "faster but rougher display option" in the visualizer prefs.

Got it, "cap frame rate at 30 fps" was checked. Never really used visualizer before so didn't think to check if for any options. Thanks!

 

[motulist]

Got it, "cap frame rate at 30 fps" was checked. Never really used visualizer before so didn't think to check if for any options. Thanks!

You're welcome. I bet it looks a lot better now. Your virtual acid trip will now be even trippier!

 

[kainjow]

core animation

can't wait to see what else apple can do with it

Ah, some Core Animation at work! This is a sign of more great things to come.

Don't be so quick to assume...

 

[caccamolle]

macrumors ... are you serious ?

is this news ? rumors ?