eyecandy

.NET library for processing audio playback as OpenGL textures

Version 3 does not require audio loopback drivers for Windows! Loopback is internal!

If you're interested in audio visualization similar to the old WinAmp plugins (Milkdrop!), or more recently, websites like Shadertoy or VertexShaderArt, then you've come to the right place. Although this is a fully independent library, it is the foundation for the monkey-hi-hat music visualization application, and the accompanying shaders in my Volt's Laboratory repository.

This library does all the hard work of capturing live-playback audio and producing different representations of the sound data as OpenGL textures. On modern Windows 10 64-bit hardware, 4-digit frame rates are not unusual. While Linux isn't officially supported yet, it does work, and it performs well enough that I have used it on a 32-bit Raspberry Pi4B, in some cases attaining 200+ FPS (due to poor/limited GPUs, the Pi will not be supported even after Linux support is officially available).

Please refer to the repository wiki for usage, configuration, and other details. The demo project is also a good reference, and the library's public API is fully documented. There is even more information in the monkey-hi-hat wiki that will be of interest to library consumers.

Demos

The repository's demo project has a lot of useful utilities, and illustrates different ways to use the library. Here is the help output (run the demo program without args to see this):

demo [type] [options]

[type]
peaks           Peak audio capture values (use for configuration)
text            Text-based audio visualizations
history         Raw history-texture dumps
wave            Raw PCM wave audio visualization
freq            Frequency magnitude and volume history (multiple shaders)
vert            VertexShaderArt-style integer-array vertex shader (no audio)
frag            Shadertoy-style pixel fragment shader
webaudio        Compares WebAudio pseudo-Decibels to pure FFT Decibels

info            OpenAL information (devices, defaults, extensions, etc.)
                (Windows requires a loopback driver; no WASAPI equivalent)

[options]
F               Full-screen mode
P               Output Process ID
O               Windows: Capture audio with OpenAL-Soft instead of WASAPI