September 5, 2008
Is this the new iTunes 8 visualizer?
Posted Sep. 5, ’08, 2:22 PM PT by David Dahlquist
Category | Apple » Speculation
Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo.
Speculation abounds that this stunning video clip may actually be the upcoming iTunes 8 music visualizer. It’s called Magnetosphere, and the designer, Allan White, has reported that it has been recently sold to a “third party”. This third party purchase coincides with the upcoming release of iTunes 8, and closely matches Kevin Rose’s description that the new iTunes visualizations are “really trippy - there is one with planet like objects wrapping around each other w/stars/light streams.”
Assuming this is real, and not pre-rendered, this video shows just how far audio visualizers have come. This thing is seriously of music-video, or Apple TV ad quality. The syncing to the beat is impeccable, and having the camera rotate to the drum hits along with frequency-specific bursts of light really make this a treat for the eyes. Woo, I get the munchies just looking at this thing…
If iTunes developers weren’t planning on adding this as a visualizer, they had better consider it, because their current visualizer looks downright cheesy in comparison.
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Sweet!
Looks great. I just hope they don't pull the typical Apple move of deleting previous visualizers in favor of the latest - something they've done with screensavers before.
check out this other video:
http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/index.html
I have Magnetosphere from back before it was sold, and it is certainly capable of producing these kinds of effects in real time. Would love to see another quality product get picked up and made native by Apple (a la Cover Flow).
Yep, this is the same visualizer from Allan White that I tested a while back. I only hope, that this is not the only major feature in iTunes 8. I hope there will be some under the hood corrections too. Improved stability or smaller footprint would be a much better "new feature" as far as I am concerned.
Are you serious?
It says right under the video "Made with Processing. Audio by Tosca (Suzuki). Rendered overnight... not real-time performance.".
Processing is a Java based motion graphics programming language. This has nothing to do with iTunes. It rocks far harder than iTunes could ever hope to.
It appears you got your wires crossed - the Magnetosphere video you embedded looks *nothing* like the capture from his iTunes visualizer version, which can be seen here:
http://vimeo.com/150662?pg=embed&sec=150662
It's much lower quality, although definitely much better than the junk they have now.
"this video shows just how far audio visualizers have come"
Aside from the quality of the graphics being displayed, there's nothing in this visualizer that wasn't in the PSX Demo Disk visualizer back in '94 - it's much better quality, and it's got a better response at low volume, but the camera moves and different elements responding to different frequencies were both available back then.
That said, if they can find a way of getting this level of performance from a live situation as opposed to prerendered, I'd never turn it off...
"It rocks far harder than iTunes could ever hope to."
Right, because you couldn't simply implement an iTunes plugin that runs Processing. That would rock too hard, or something.
As the previous poster pointed out, Processing is script based graphics programming tool, and the video above was not rendered in realtime. However, if Apple simply like the way it looked, they could buy/take the algorithm and rewrite it in OpenGL. This could potentially increase the speeds enough to be realtime.