(Unofficial) Aurora Synesthesia

[Zodius]

Update!! Alpha 1.06 now out!!

Hi All,

Thanks for the support you have all been giving me with this program. The latest version is now out and can be downloaded here (Alpha 1.06). To install, download the zip and extract it, double-clicking on the exe to start it up.

Synesthesia mode (Sound-To-Light) requires that you change your recording channel to Stereo-Mix. I recommend searching for guides and videos on how to do this as the setup for XP and Vista are rather different, and Vista hides stereo-mix by default.

For those keen on making it boot on startup, create a shortcut the the program and place it in the Startup folder under your all programs listing. There is likely to be a shortcut to the amBX Effects Manager in that folder too.

For more details check out my main post on the subject near the end of page ten.


For those experiencing issues with the latest version, or just prefer the way things were before, Alpha 1.05 can be downloaded from here (details midway through page five).

Enjoy
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________________________________________

Hi All,

A month ago I brought the amBX Starter kit because I had some spare cash and was intrigued by the ambient experience the lights were said to offer, and I have been thoroughly pleased with them when watching movies and playing games, but music on the other hand didn't impress me as much. Yes admittedly the lights changed colour based on the music, but i felt there wasn't enough of a relation between them, and in some cases it seemed to be purely random (although thats probably down to my taste in music ).

Being a programmer by trade, I set myself the challenge of solving this by making a system that would be as discrete as amBX Illuminate but work for any sound or music played through your computer, in a similar way to what the FXGen does for games.
I've achieved this by having a small tray program that listens to and processes the sound coming in from the recording input, via the use of FMOD Ex (http://www.fmod.org/), and converts it into RGB for each light based on a set of colours. These are Red = Bass, Green = Mid, and Blue = Treble (these will eventually be customisable). The only snag with this is that your computer's sound card or motherboard must support Stereo-Mix recording for it to work, otherwise it can only respond to a microphone.

I've dubbed this application "Aurora Synesthesia". I would offer a demo video or even the program itself at this point, but I currently have an issue with my amBX system that is preventing me from continuing, which I hope you'll be able to assist with.

I've added a couple of snaps of the animated tray icon in action and adapting to the music like the lights should.

Synesthesia_Tray_Icon.png (3.79 KiB) Viewed 37996 times

For some reason that I can't quite gather, when I run my program four of the light positions seem to be linked when I only want the South West light to come on. I don't believe this is caused by Synesthesia as I've set it so all the lights should be independent to give a full 360 effect. When I close the program though and try the amBX Test Tool (part of the SDK) these groupings stick, so when I press North for example, that and Centre and another position come on too. This is clearly an issue with my amBX installation but I don't know how to solve it.

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.
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[Milmoor]

Very nice! The analyzing of sound is something the amBX software is lacking indeed. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer, neither are most on this forum. You might be better of asking your questions overhere. That forum is especially for developing for amBX.

[Zodius]

Thanks for the comment.

I have already posted over in that forum prior to this, in case it is an issue with my code, but I've not received any reply as yet. I fact the forum looks rather dead. So I thought I would give here a shot as well, not only to tell you all about it, but also see if the issue is related to my amBX Installation rather than Synesthesia (I believe this to be so).

A bit more info about the system:

As I mentioned previously it makes use of FMOD, which is incorporated in many popular rhythm games (i.e GH), but the reason I chose it is because it can do frequency analysis on a continuous audio source rather than just a file. With this I've gone for a one-size-fits-all profile whereby colours are evenly distributed between frequencies, so low frequencies (bass) give low colours (red), and so on. It is my hope that once I release this and implement custom profiles that people will come up with patterns that suit some music more than others, as is done with the amBX AudioFXGen plugin.

Anyway, while I'm waiting for a solution to my problem, feel free to ask me anything more about this, or even suggest how you would expect the lights to look with particular pieces of music.

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[Milmoor]

I know the developers have been quite busy with amBX related items (the professional edition for example), that's why things have been a bit slow there. Since they are wrapping up their sidequests, forum and drivers will gain priority in the near future.
I'm not good with sound analyses unfortunately. But there are those who made visualizers for WinAmp, Mediaplayer etc. who have. You might want to read a guide for creating one of those. But you probably don't need to since you've almost lost me in the things you've already accomplised.
A related but different approach for your program would be making it an addon instead of a standalone. To avoid having to support all kind of different programs, it might be advicable to hook into an existing interface. Since quite a few programs (Albumplayer for example) supports these kind of plugins, you would help quite a few people in one go.
I really would like amBX to support music playback without hogging all resources. Quite a few music/movieplaying devices don't have a lot of resources to spare. At the moment Milkdrop is the only Winamp plugin which supports amBX. It does so by analysing the screen which should not be necessary if the plugin was using the SDK. It brings my Via Epia SP1300 to it's knees.
Another pet subject of mine is movieplayback. See this link.

[Zodius]

I know the developers have been quite busy with amBX related items (the professional edition for example), that's why things have been a bit slow there. Since they are wrapping up their sidequests, forum and drivers will gain priority in the near future.

Ah right, that explains the lack of activity, but it still doesn't help me with my amBX installation issue, which is delaying the progress of this program.

I'm not good with sound analyses unfortunately. But there are those who made visualizers for WinAmp, Mediaplayer etc. who have. You might want to read a guide for creating one of those. But you probably don't need to since you've almost lost me in the things you've already accomplised.

Perhaps, but i'm no audio specialist, I just know how to read and understand SDK's to create the things I want.

A related but different approach for your program would be making it an addon instead of a standalone. To avoid having to support all kind of different programs, it might be advicable to hook into an existing interface. Since quite a few programs (Albumplayer for example) supports these kind of plugins, you would help quite a few people in one go.

I don't quite get your suggestion for making Synesthesia into an addon instead of standalone, unless I haven't explained how it works clearly enough (I do have a tendancy to ramble). At present the only requirement of my program is that the computer has a stereo-mix option in the Recording Control (I don't know whether this is a common or rare feature)

The Recording Control in Windows XP, showing Stereo-Mix as the active recording channel

Recording Control.gif (14.21 KiB) Viewed 37979 times

This means that any sound that is played by your computer will be picked up by Synesthesia, so there is no need for it to support different kinds of programs.

I'll give you an example of the typical use I've been having with it. I would play a few albums in WMP during the day, in the evening switch over to an internet radio station, and later on visit Youtube and go through a playlist of music videos. Synesthesia works in the background and doesn't care what program is making the noise.

I really would like amBX to support music playback without hogging all resources. Quite a few music/movieplaying devices don't have a lot of resources to spare. At the moment Milkdrop is the only Winamp plugin which supports amBX. It does so by analysing the screen which should not be necessary if the plugin was using the SDK. It brings my Via Epia SP1300 to it's knees.

Well regarding performance, on my 3-year old Athlon X2 dual-core machine, the amBX_Service runs at about 10% CPU, but Synesthesia barely touches 2%, so its pretty resource friendly, although I haven't got a small device to try it out on. Is that comparable to Milkdrops performance?

I'll be interested to hear your views about it, as well as anybody else who would like to join this discussion.

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[Zodius]

Well the dev forum came through and suggested I revert to the January version of the SDK until they release the next one, which has fixed the issue. So now this thread can be just about this program and any questions/comments people would like to make.

Edit: as a side note, does anybody have any tips for recording the lighting effects with a camera as I've always found videos never show them in their true light (no pun intended).

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[Chronicle112]

well im looking forward to the program, but will it also work with vista? cause i cant find a stereo mix option anywhere in vista

thx for the program already and good luck developing it

[Zodius]

It should work with Vista as well as Windows 7. I haven't tested this though but all of my other programs built in the same way work.

As for Stereo-Mix in Vista, here are some vids for enabling it (if your computer has one).

XP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiW4lj5ZUNc
Vista: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5qa-HODWbc

I have a Realtech soundchip in my motherboard and that supports it. If you have anything by creative then even better (Goes by the name of What U Hear)

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[Zodius]

Hi Again,

Been as though its been a few days since my last post, I thought it would be a good idea to keep you all updated with the progress I've made with Synesthesia (and there are a few surprises!).

The audio analysis is complete, although there is no way of setting profiles for different colour schemes, but I hope the one its got will be suitable for the majority of people. For those interested the effect is comprised of two parts, ambient colours and colour pulses. The ambient is based on the general volume level and shape of the sound being played, giving a great relaxing effect on classical pieces of music or those without many sudden changes. For the more upbeat music the sound is checked for sudden changes in volume and emits pulses of the appropriate colour. These pulses start at the North wall-washer and emanate around the center, giving an almost wave-like effect that surrounds you.

People will have to see for themselves what they think of the effect, but I really like it and how calm music gives calm light effects and energetic music gives energetic light effects.



Now for the surprise Been as though I've got this program that can control the lights it seemed silly not to see what other functionality could be included (that was possibly lacking from the official software). This lead me into the Web section of this forum, which i didn't even know that amBX was meant to support. This got me thinking about how cool it would be to have the lights match the colour of a web page, or even your desktop.

So, Synesthesia has had a bit of a overhaul to introduce a new feature I'm calling Aurora (making the programs new name Aurora Synesthesia). It works in much the same way as FXGen but rather than recording games, records your normal screen, making the lights reflect whats going on. Like the rest of the system this happens at 20fps, so whatever is being displayed on your computer will be reflected in the lights, be it MS Word, your favorite amBX forum, or even videos played in WMP and on YouTube. Some programs won't work with it though, such as 3D games (use FXGen for those) and some media players (PowerDVD just appears black to it). Flash games work with it, and I've even adapted it to work with Quake Live! (although its very performance hungry)



When Aurora Synesthesia is complete it will have three modes to choose from, Synesthesia Only mode (sound-to-light), Aurora Only mode (screen-to-light), and a hybrid mode with the effect of Synesthesia's coloured pulses overlaid on top of the aurora effect.

Well I'm rather tired now (been working on this pretty much constantly since I last mentioned it), but am very pleased with results its producing and, once ready to show you, I hope you'll agree.

Until next time, have a good weekend!
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[Milmoor]

/salute
Wonderful news. I'll do some testing as promised. Where can I download the software?

[Zodius]

I like your eagerness You'll have to give me a couple more days I'm afraid. If I give it to you in the current state it will surely crash on your computer (unless you have the same system configuration as I do). Give a few more days (not taking into account any unwanted delays) you'll be able to test and enjoy Aurora Synesthesia the same way I am.

Until then though, just a quick pic of the only bit of UI this program has (the splash screen)

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[Zodius]

The alpha version is here!!

I've made a number of tweaks to this, to not only make it more performance friendly but also more likely to work on other peoples machines. One of the changes was to lower the frame rate from 20fps to 10fps. There are 2 reasons for this, firstly higher frame rates cause the amBX service to be more active, and secondly when watching things with flashing images (such as a concert) the lights react rather too well and get kind of disorientating.

This build is only intended for people to try and give feedback, and not for people to use constantly (although it would be great if people like it that much). To use it simply extract the attached zip file and run the included exe. After a few second of initialising and the necessary splash screen (for free licencing of FMOD) the program will start and appear in your system tray with an icon reflecting the north facing light.

As mentioned in earlier posts there are three modes which can be selected by right clicking on the tray icon.

• Aurora Synesthesia mode is the default giving both screen matching and sound effects.
• Aurora just gives screen matching effects, making it great for watching YouTube videos or working with games such as Quake-Live or even those old ones that amBX won't recognise.
• Synesthesia mode is just for music, giving dynamic effects based on any anything being played, by any media player.

At any time if you want to know what mode you're in just hover over the icon and wait for the tool tip to appear.

I think that's everything you need to know about this, although in reality it just be something that runs in the background that you can just forget about. Just one note of caution, as this uses the SDK i've had experiences of it taking over from applications that either have amBX built in or use the FXGen.

Thank you all, and I hope you'll find Aurora Synesthesia as enjoyable to use as I do.

Edit: The file has now been added on the following page of this topic. For people really interested in this who would like to contribute to its development, please PM me with your email address so I can send the file to you personally as well as giving a bit more one-to-one support.

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[icecrusher777]

Nice program, works fine for me (after a little installation error) - but now it works without any problems and it's great! Nothing negative to say by now... =) THANK YOU! And thanks for your help too.

[DeltaBlast]

Just something interesting to note:

The program only worked for my microphone, so I tried to set it to stereomix. But as I'm running Vista, it's not as easy anymore as in the good old XP days.

However, I did found out that it's possible to get stereomix back in vista: just go to the sound options, go to record, rightclick and select "show disabled devices". Stereomix appears! make it default, restart AS, and it works!

See here: (dutch version)
http://stuff.digicrap.com/showdisabledd ... reomix.jpg

Also interesting: the colors and intensity change depending on the volume. Pretty cool.. I'll be using this a lot I think ^_^

[Zodius]

Thanks for the comments.

I have actually tried it with the microphone and its cool to see the lights flash when you shout into it but the novelty wares off pretty quickly. Stereo-Mix is where its at!! Now if this works as expected then any media player or sound played through your pc should be shown? Could people confirm, particularly with players that amBX doesn't currently support.

One point I need to make. The Screen-to-light mode has serious performance issues running under Vista (and I'm guessing Windows 7) due to the way the transparent effects work. If you want a quick fix to this I'm afraid you'll have to revert to either Classic or Vista Basic theme. If anybody tries please let me know if this improves performance as I'll then know for sure what the problem is.

Thanks for the feedback so far!
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P.S Feel free to upload any pictures of your systems in action with either the screen-to-light or sound-to-light modes.