Use an oscilloscope-like visualizer in iTunes

Jan 18, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: knifehandchop

Not really a hint, but one thing I've missed since I switched two years ago was Windows Media Player's "scope" visualisation. I'm sure I'm not the only person who enjoyed making the line wobble in erratic ways, or putting on some ambient music and surfing the sine waves. I was searching iTunes visualisations for this feature when I came across iVisualize. While this doesn't have the oscilloscope I was looking for, it did have a visualization that had one in it (iVestream).

Handily, these are just Quartz Compositions, so I tinkered around in Quartz Composer for a while (two nights actually), and through total trial and error, managed to end up with something usable (Scope.qtz - 28KB). Obviously, iVisualize needs to be installed first, then just drop the Scope.qtz file into Library -> iTunes -> iVisualize.

If anyone out there with any knowledge of Quartz Composer wants to tinker further to increase the resolution of the image, then please do so. I tried to to get help from a couple of Quartz Composer forums, but they weren't interested. And to change the colour, open the composition in Quartz Composer and edit the "Sprite" item (#5) -- the info window has a colour chooser box, just change that to whatever's needed. If anyone can whack this into the options menu of iVisualize...

I understand this is barely a hint, more a half-finished bit of code begging to be finished, but I always loved the scope on WMP, and just don't find iTunes visualisations all that great.

[robg adds: I chose to run this one due to the possibilities presented by using iVisualize and Quartz Composer to create your own iTunes visualizers, for those who find the stock versions unsatisfying.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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