projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop by Geiss in a more modern, cross-platform reusable library.
Its purpose in life is to read in audio input and produce mesmerizing visuals, detecting tempo, and rendering advanced equations into a limitless array of user-contributed visualizations.
- Mac OS X, Linux (binary)
- Mac OS X iTunes (plugin)
- Android
- iOS
- Qt5 + Pulseaudio
- ALSA, xmms, winamp, jack (source, unmaintained)
You can read more about how it works and the current state of development here.
The preset files define the visualizations via pixel shaders and Milkdrop-style equations and parameters. Included with projectM are the bltc201, Milkdrop 1 and 2, projectM, tryptonaut and yin collections. You can grab all of the presets here.
./autogen.sh
./configure && make && sudo make install
sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool libsdl2-dev libglew-dev libftgl-dev libsdl2-dev libdevil-dev
pkg install gcc autoconf automake libtool mesa-libs libGLU sdl2
- Install the SDL2 Framework
./configure --enable-sdl
At its core projectM is a library, libprojectM. This library is responsible for parsing presets, analyzing audio PCM data with beat detection and FFT, applying the preset to the audio feature data and rendering the resulting output with openGL. It can render to an openGL context or a texture.
For an example of a very simple example use of the library see the libSDL2 sample code.
There are many other applications that make use of libprojectM that can be found in the src directory.
- Top priority has for a long time been to port the calls from OpenGL immediate-mode (old-school) to be compatible with OpenGL ES, using vertex buffer objects. There's a todo list of function calls to replace.
- macOS Sierra broke the iTunes plugin somehow (this is semi-fixed)
- Currently shader support is done via nVidia's Cg shader toolkit. This is ancient and no longer supported and very lame. Use standard OpenGL facilities for compiling and executing the shader-based presets.
- Support for the missing Milkdrop waveforms to get full compatibility with Milkdrop presets.
- Steal cool stuff from the recently-released Milkdrop source.
- Update the various applications using libprojectM.
Report issues on GitHub We're on IRC at irc.freenode.net #projectM
If you would like to help improve this project, either with documentation, code, porting, hardware or anything else please let us know! We gladly accept pull requests and issues.
If you maintain packages of libprojectM, we are happy to work with you! Please note well:
- The main focus of this project is libprojectM. It's a library that only really depends on OpenGL. The other applications are more like examples and demos.
- This project was converted to use GNU autotools instead of CMake in 2018. This was due to inflexibility of CMake, issues with OSX and SDL2, an unintuitive configuration interface, standardizing on the most common and well-understood build system, a desire to make it easier for others to get up and running and contribute, and other factors too lengthy to expound on here.
- Most of the applications (e.g.
src/projectM-*
) are likely outdated and of less utility than the core library. If you desire to use them or depend on them, please file an issue so we can help update them. - The "canonical" application for actually viewing the visualizations is now projectM-sdl, based on libSDL2 because it supports audio input and is completely cross-platform.
- This is an open source project! If you don't like something, feel free to contribute improvements!
- Yes, you are looking at the official version. This is not a fork.