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Visual > Responsiveness

While I have a feeling this isn't a bug per se, none of the quartz visuals seem to sync with the audio. For all I know this is a weakness on Apple's part in regards to the tools and techniques they make available for developers to rig this sort of thing up. Then again maybe my expectations are off. My assumption was that the effect was intended to be something that parallels that of a light organ, where either the light intensity, color, position or other parameter would shift in tight response to certain changes in the audio (e.g. green lights flash every time bass beat thumps); or like the led's on an eq that go up and down in direct response to the frequencies playing.

Crux: While my visuals flash and move, you have to really stare at them and concentrate in order to recognize any semblance of a relationship to the currently playing music. Ultimately the visuals appear utterly disconnected from what's happening in the audio spectrum; while the band plays on, the visuals basically hang out and flutter like an earless Carmen Miranda.



My apologies if the goal was not to exhibit a tight interaction between the visuals and the audio.
Thanks to all the MachineCodexeRz for their diligent AC efforts

Hi inspirebeauty,

Thanks for your post, and for the picture of the inimitable Carmen!

Your point is well taken, indeed the visualizers are supposed to synchronise with the music. How well they synchronise is another matter, being somewhat subjective.

At present, all AudioCodex visualizers use the microphone for audio input. In the future we hope to be able to add support for direct spectrum input from our program to the visualizer without the round trip through the speakers and microphone. This trip introduces a small but noticeable lag into the synchronisation. Processor speed also plays a part.

For some background, I'll point out that our visualizers are simple Quartz Compositions. As such they are completely open source, and thus open to modification. You don't even need any programming skills to do so - we invite you to open them up in Quartz Composer and tweak them to your liking.

To do so, you'll need to install the Quartz Composer app, which is part of the Xcode Tools on your Mac OS X 10 installer disk. Once you have it installed, opening one of our qtz files will allow you to explore, and modify, exactly how the visualizer responds to the audio input, within the limits of Quartz Composer itself.

Hope this helps,

Aha! That would explain the occasional sync between the music and the visualizer! Thanks so much for clarifying. It wasn't a complaint, more a curiosity. I'm sure there are more important details to be worked out in order to get to your release. I've actually had "tinkering with quartz composer" on my to-do list for some time now, AudioCodex was actually an impetus for this. I just haven't been so inspired to mess with it so long as it wouldn't respond tightly to track playback. Nevertheless I'll look forward to that mini-project someday, sometime after you all find time to hookup that particular eye candy. In the meantime I'll enjoy what AC does offer and look forward to 1.0!

As a follow up, as of version 1.30 we have introduced support for the Quartz Composer Music Visualizer Protocol, which enables direct communication between AudioCodex and Quartz compositions. We have also introduced preliminary support for audio spectrum data to be provided to the loaded composition.

These capabilities are much improved in version 1.40, which includes a Sonograph view which demonstrates a much more precise correlation between the visualizer and the instantaneous spectral data.

Our track data is available to anyone who wishes to develop visualizers for AudioCodex, as discussed in my article on the Music Visualizer Protocol.