Quartz Compositions

Submitted by alex on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 11:21.

AudioCodex Visualizers are generated from Quartz Composition files which contain a graph of linked 2D and 3D generators, filters and environments. Quartz Compositions are an Apple supported standard within Mac OS X, and are used most commonly to create screen savers and other self-generating animated graphics.

Apple’s Quartz Composer application is used to create and edit Quartz composer files, which have filenames which end in .qtz. Creating and editing Quartz Compositions is challenging but fun for programmers and non-programmers alike.

QTZ files

Like AudioUnits, default storage locations exist for QTZ files. OSX’s screen saver can load QTZ files as modules, if the QTZ files are placed in any of the following locations on your Mac:

  • /Library/Screen Savers/
  • /Library/Compositions/ [Mac OS X 10.5+]
  • /System/Library/Screen Savers/
  • /System/Library/Compositions/ [Mac OS X 10.5+]
  • ~/Library/Screen Savers/
  • ~/Library/Compositions/

Note that only an Administrator user can add or change files in the first four folders.

AudioCodex scans all of these locations for QTZ files, plus an additional ‘private’ folder where users can place QTZ files that they don’t want available as Screen Savers, but do want to use within AudioCodex, at:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/AudioCodex/Compositions/

Quartz Composer

Quartz Composer is used to create and edit Quartz Compositions.

Quartz Composer is a part of Apple’s free Xcode Tools for developers. To install Xcode Tools, launch the installer package from your Mac OS X 10.4 install DVD.

MachineCodex Bundled Compositions

  • See QtlCodex - MachineCodex Quartz Composer Lab for detailed descriptions of these compositions.

    • 3rd Party Compositions

    Resources

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