Milkdrop

Milkdrop is a music visualization plugin for the media player Winamp. In a built-in editor you can directly create and edit your own visualization presets. Basically there are some simple waves, which can be painted on a canvas, and then the canvas can be warped and faded out. One such warp could be a zoom in or out, a rotation, or a shift. But everything is highly customizable and you can define your very own equations in an own simple script language. The immediate feedback of any changes makes Milkdrop a highly addictive programming environment. There are lines and shapes which can be colored and moved around, and of course the script language offers some input variables, for instance the volume of the sound being played by Winamp (separate values for bass, mid, and treble). With Winamp5.5 and Milkdrop2.0 a pixel shader support for HLSL, the DirectX High Level Shader Language, was introduced. Pixel shaders are small programs, that run directly on the graphics card and take advantage of a massive parallelization. The program gets executed for every pixel on the screen and there are two types of shaders that can be applied. One for a final composition of the image, and another shader whose effect continuously draws from one frame to the next. You can bind in external textures and there are some built-in blur and noise levels that can be combined for great effects (especially known from biochemistry). I am a total autodidact and along the way I have collected thousands of sketches and a whole bunch of unique masterpieces. Look out for Flexi! At last I am working on a tiny clone for Processing and OpenGL.