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[William-NM]

As I was getting MilkDrop2 working in MC29, in a burst of enthusiasm, I tried to clean up the ancient install document and files (zip). Once a decade whether it needs it or not, eh?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14lR_98MLpsNdC8qu0zeLev_vygZYtm7K/view?usp=sharing

Not updated, but possibly of interest (a few newer presets):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16GupAFz3SghlXxS6ou_eSAI9-1nivplr/view?usp=sharing

Still an important piece of our anti-productivity toolkits!
William

[HPBEME]

I saw your post a while back and meant to reply sooner.  If you are the original person who posted that instruction sheet for installing Milkdrop, thank you!  There is no chance I would have ever figured that out on my own.

Since that original installation however, I personally have been able to get Milkdrop running on every install of MC going back probably 10 versions now, but... with one major hiccup. After starting MC with a visualization set to anything other than Milkdrop (say Cover art), if I then switch to any other visualization that is not Milkdrop, it crashes MC instantly. That said, as long as I switch the initial visualization (from whatever) to Milkdrop first, then no problem.  If I close MC with Milkdrop as the last active visualization, I can immediately switch to any other visualization without a problem as well. Once you've made the initial switch correctly, you can then switch amongst all the visualizations in any order at any time and there are no issues. Once you close MC and reopen it however, you have to repeat this "initialization" process to avoid crashes in the new MC session.

Aside from this particular anomaly, Milkdrop basically works fine - the cover art and song title are displayed for a few seconds when a new track begins. However, I have over 47,000 Milkdrop presets in various preset folders, yet it seemed to only recognize at most a hundred or so. I have checked the various Milkdrop options you can access while it is in use to see if I had anything set that would limit the presets used, but did not find anything that stood out to me. In an attempt to make Milkdrop see more presets, I took all of them out of the various segregated preset folders and moved all 47,000+ files into a single flat directory.  This did seem to increase the number being used, maybe up to a couple hundred different presets, but nowhere close to the number of files that exist.

I am curious if you have experienced the same thing as me above and you just deal with it, or if you found a workaround that resolves it, or you don't have this issue it all.

In any event, I got pretty good at remembering to switch the initial visualization to Milkdrop as soon as I opened MC, but inevitably would still forget on occasion, and MC would annoyingly crash.  I finally tired of dealing with this and have given up on trying to use Milkdrop anymore starting with MC 30.  If Matt/J River are interested in trying to resolve this issue, I don't remember the exact error dialog, but it definitely was related to "loading a DLL file".

I should also point out this is also an issue when running multiple zones. If you activate Milkdrop in a zone while another zone already is already running Milkdrop, that will also instantly crash MC.

[eve]

I went down the music visualizer rabbithole a while back and it's ABSURD how there isn't something mind-blowing out there. You'd think someone, anyone would be thinking about it.

projectM is the front runner to succeed Milkdrop2.
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm
It's an open source re-implementation of Milkdrop that's quite performant and flexible. So all your milkdrop presets *should* work in it.

About the closest thing to 'wow-factor' visualization are VJ tools but they're not hands off. If you wanted to sort of set and forget it, you could absolutely program a whole 'show' and just use that with whatever audio you want.

I was running audio out of my main playback system, over ADAT into another machine that was doing the music visualization portion, I tried it all in the same box but it was way more convenient to do externally since you can kind of just leave that second machine running with your setup and then pipe audio in as you please.

Synesthesia & Resolume are the 2 I have most experience with. It's cool I guess but really not suited for day to day music visualization.

[HPBEME]

I went down the music visualizer rabbithole a while back and it's ABSURD how there isn't something mind-blowing out there. You'd think someone, anyone would be thinking about it.

The Soundspectrum visualizers used to work flawlessly with JRiver, but starting 5, 7, maybe even 10 years ago, consistent compatibility with JRiver started to deteriorate to the point where it no longer works integrated within MC at all.  I am able to sort of get the standalone versions working, but not very well - most of the time it will not react to audio no matter what source I choose, or it will take at least 30 seconds or so before it does.  Sometimes it suddenly starts to work, and then just as bizarrely, stops.  According to the primary person at Soundspectrum, the programs are no longer compatible and there are no plans to make it so.  That said, I have seen posts by some users on this forum who claim they have them working together just fine, so who knows.

I stumbled onto the project–M visualizer through Steam about a year ago, and it seems to work fairly well. But I found another better option, also through Steam.  Pick up a program called Wallpaper Engine https://www.wallpaperengine.io/en, which is a "live wallpaper" program for a one-time cost of 4 whole dollars! Even if you never use the music visualization aspect, there are thousands of live wallpapers available that are stunning and worth getting the program for that alone.  And to be clear, you never ever have to pay for any of the wallpapers that you use.

Once you have that program installed, you can filter on audio analyzer wallpapers. Look for one cleverly named Milkdrop and another one even more cleverly named ButterChurn. Both use Milkdrop2 presets, which are apparently stored somewhere on Steam' s server, so you do not need (nor will it use) any presets of your own. IMO, the ButterChurn wallpaper seems to perform better. 

Synesthesia & Resolume are the 2 I have most experience with. It's cool I guess but really not suited for day to day music visualization.

I went to the Synesthesia website… Looks very interesting. I downloaded the free version and will check it out in the near future.  Thanks for the info.

[HPBEME]

All that said in my prior post, I yearn for a visualizer that is integrated directly into MC and works flawlessly like when I first installed MC 16 years ago.

There are several really good visualizers out there, but none integrate directly with MC - all have to be launched/used separately as standalone programs.