The little volume meter next to Stereo Mix should flicker up and down, indicating the Stereo Mix has access to the audio output of whatever you’re listening to. Load up literally any audio source on your computer-YouTube video, Spotify playlist, doesn’t matter. Now is a good time to test if Stereo Mix is functioning as expected.
Let’s dig in with the start-to-finish list of steps to get your visualizer up and running.
In short, if the audio is coming into, passing through, or produced by your Windows PC, Winamp can capture it and visualize it. If you want the visualizer to react to not just the music at a party but the noise level and energy of the party itself, for example, you could run the visualizer off a microphone feed instead of the speaker feed. That includes music you play on Spotify or YouTube, any local audio files, and even the audio input from a microphone. The method we’re about to outline will allow you to take any audio input your Windows computer can pull in and output it as a Winamp visualization. With the history we just covered in mind, it’s no wonder that all these years later, people still have a soft spot for Geiss and other early Winamp music visualizers.įortunately, if you wish you could enjoy some of those classic Winamp visualizations alongside your modern music collection without resorting to rebuilding your Spotify playlist from a mish-mash of ripped MP3 files, you’re in luck.īy leveraging a hidden and lesser-known function in Winamp, we can pull in audio from external sources and pass it through the Winamp system-which means the audio visualizer plugins can process it and give us the colorful light show we crave.īetter yet, we’re not just limited to a specific streaming audio source or even internet-based audio sources at all.
How to Use Winamp Music Visualizations With Any Source Bottom of a sea urchin? Middle of a bass drop? Maybe both? For a significant number of people, MP3s, Winamp, and Winamp visualizations were completely intertwined. By 2001 over 60 million people had downloaded Winamp, and millions of them were enjoying the fun visualizations that came with it.
In fact, the popularity of Winamp mirrored the rise in popularity of the MP3 format itself. People loved to watch them and see what colorful output their favorite songs would produce. The complexity of the visualizations and their pseudo-psychedelic patterns contributed to the popularity of the plugins. Geiss, Milkdrop, and the other plugins released at the time were so much more than a simple bar visualizer or waveform display.
We recommend setting the video quality to 1080p for the full effect. Below is a sample video we plucked off YouTube where a fan of the Milkdrop visualizer recorded the output while playing a progressive house playlist. The pictures we’ve included are certainly interesting to look at, but if a picture is worth a thousand words in the case of music visualizers, a video is worth even more. The Geiss plugin was downloaded by millions of Winamp fans and proved to be so popular that Nullsoft, the company behind Winamp, hired Ryan to write even more music visualizer plugins, including a much more powerful followup to Geiss called Milkdrop. We can say with confidence quite a few people-author included-listened to a lot of techno in the early 2000s with that as a visual backdrop. The liquid metal flow and waveform overlay, seen in the screenshot above, was among the various modes Geiss would play in and readily identifiable to fans of the plugin. That same year programmer Ryan Geiss created the eponymous Geiss plugin for Winamp.
Geiss 1.0 put Winamp visualizers on the map. Among the first plugins that shipped with the updated version were two input plugins and a music visualizer plugin. At that point, the simple little MP3 player had been redesigned to be a general-purpose audio player that, crucial to our discussion here, now supported plugins. Where things got more interesting is with the release of Winamp 1.90 in early 1998.