I was digging through some of my old, unfinished projects this week and found one that I’d barely started. The goal was to write a scriptable audio visualization tool in C, approaching this art form differently than most viz tools today.
As a former light tech for a band that toured the US (and abroad, though I didn’t go on that tour) such plugins have never fully scratched my creative itch. I’ve played with the two leaders: Winamp AVS and Milkdrop. Both leave me with a feeling that so much more is possible, if only I could bypass the computer’s often inaccurate idea of what looks good. I want control over what is displayed at all times.
Enter Kaffeeklatsch: a fully managed C# visualization application. It does not require connectivity to an audio player to visualize — because you, not the music, control what it does. Just about every action possible from the effect designer can be bound to a key press or key release. (There will be an option to stream audio data from some media players for scope and similar effects.)
And effect plugins are a breeze to write. If you’ve ever wanted more from visualizers, Kaffeeklatsch provides a clean, elegant plugin interface. Public fields and properties can be tagged as options, enabling the designer to automatically generate option pages; public methods tagged as triggers will be automatic candidates for key bindings.
Kaffeeklatsch: Visualization reborn.
