Music System Update: Visualizers

Earlier this month in my music system "upgrades" post, I talked about equalizers and visualizers. Equalizers then got a separate follow-up post, so it's only fair that visualizers get one too.

I started out, as I said in my first post, with a Rainmeter skin called Monstercat Visualizer. It looks cool, especially with the album art, but since it plays on my desktop, it gets covered up by any active windows. What good is a visualizer if I hardly ever see it?

I often listen to music while doing other things on my computer, so I thought it would be nice to have a visualizer which is always visible, perhaps floating on top of other windows. After a good deal of searching and trying out different programs, I've landed on BeatHUD.

BeatHUD has a variety of visualizations – my favourite is pixel, shown below – with customizable colours and backgrounds. In HUD mode, it does exactly what I want – float wherever I want to place it, while also letting me adjust its size or minimize it if it's in the way. In the pic below, BeatHUD at bottom right is responding to Spotify, while I edit photos in Affinity.

I really like BeatHUD. It's surprisingly well-designed and full-featured for a free app – or by any standards, really.

I use Spotify for streaming audio, but for music that lives on my hard drive, I like to use Winamp. Mainly for nostalgic reasons: Winamp – and Winamp skins – were a big part of my teenage years. So while I was at it, I also downloaded Classic Spectrum Analyzer for Winamp:

Having sorted out the visualizer situation on my computer, I wanted something similar for our living-room system – a custom-built amplifier by Pradip Deb (which supports Bluetooth as well as wired inputs for turntables and such) plus two passive speakers.

Maybe someday I'll get a streamer with a display, like the WiiM Ultra, but until then, I'm just using my phone screen as it streams to the amp via Bluetooth:

On my phone, I use Spectrum Analyzer & Visualizer, which can display various customizable visualizations as well as Spotify album art (in the pic, I'm playing ฟื้น / Athithan by Yellow Fang).

This is a free app, but I like it so much that I'm going to buy it just to support the developer.

If you let the app access your phone mic, it can also respond to external audio, e.g. from a record-player. But when playing records, I like to simply display the record sleeve itself – the ultimate "Now playing" visualization.

Incidentally, I added a new track to my Speaker Test playlist which I mentioned in an earlier post. I thought I should have a track which uses obvious stereo panning, so the playlist now includes Pink Floyd's Money.