Audio Visualizer Adobe After Effects
Priamo Gregory
Music and audio content always need new and attractive ways to reach and engage with the audience. A great way to share your content is with an Audio Visualizer. They can bring life to your audio by adding motion as if the frequencies were speaking to you.
Today, you'll learn how to create an audio visualizer for your music. But even if you're not a musician, you can use audio visualizers for podcasts, video content, school projects, advertisements, and more.
Audio visualizers or music visualizers are graphics that react to the beats of music tracks or audio clips. They analyze data from the sound source to generate its visual representation and provide an engaging visual look, highlighting the audio source over the rest of the video or background.
Using an audio visualizer effect allows people to listen and see your music. They can be subtle frequencies or waveforms over a quiet background or a big dancing circle jumping to the rhythm of a dance track.
Creating a music visualizer in Adobe After Effects will only take a few seconds with an easy-to-use effect called Audio Spectrum. With Audio Spectrum, you can customize the audio visualizer to make fresh-looking graphics.
Create a new composition with the aspect ratio you need depending on the destination (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). Import your audio file with the music or sound you want to generate the audio visualizer and drag the audio to the timeline.
Go to the Effects Control and display the Audio Spectrum. Click the dropdown menu for 'Audio Layer' and select the layer with the audio file you imported initially. It should have the name of your audio track. If you scrub through the video, you will see some movement on the audio visualizer.
The Start and End Point parameter allows you to set the position of the audio visualizer. You can adjust its X and Y positions. But you can also define a path using the shapes or the pen tool to draw the position and shape you want for the audio visualizer. Then, select the mask in the Path dropdown menu.
You can set the range of frequencies you want to display in the audio visualizer. Set the lowest frequency you want to display in Start Frequency and the highest in End Frequency to highlight your song, and set the frequency bands to display in the audio visualizer.
Adjust the maximum height to make the visualizer jump higher, and experiment with the Thickness and Softness. In Display Options, you can choose the type of audio visualizer between Digital, Analog Lines, or Analog Dots. Then, change how to display it on Side Options where Side A & B will show the audio spectrum above and below, Side A only above, and Side B only Below.
Choose the color of the audio visualizer, combining an inside and outside color for the bars. The Hue Interpolation settings rotate through the hue color space. It will first use colors similar to the selected ones, and then, as you increase the values, it will start adding other colors. If you want a rainbow look, you can add a few turns until you achieve the ideal result.
You can add multiple instances of the Audio Spectrum effect and make slight changes to give the audio visualizer more depth. Add the Polar Coordinates effect to make a circle audio visualizer and adjust the Start and End Points of the Audio Spectrum effect. Other effects you can experiment with are Venetian Blinds, Glow, and Gaussian Blur to create more complex looks.
Import your audio track into After Effects and create a new composition with the aspect ratio of your choice. Drag your audio and drop it into the timeline. Go to Layer > New > Solid to create the solid, where you'll add the audio visualizer effect.
Under Generator, you can change the style, choose between waveform and frequency, and choose whether to display bars or dots. Each style will enable additional settings to be tweaked, so experiment with them.
Enabling Gradient will allow you to set the color of your audio visualizer, play with the settings to select the colors, and change the gradient type. You have other parameters like Color Correct to adjust hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, and Film Glow.
Go to the Effects Controls and scroll down until you reach the Background parameter. Change the Background Mode to solid and choose a color for a solid color background, or choose gradient and display the gradient controls to select your color, type of gradient, and other settings.
Experimenting with different forms of audio visualizers is important if you want to refine your style and make your music identifiable through visual representation. With the Boris FX Continuum Audio Visualizer effect, you can create custom visualizers and save them for later use. Whether you need audio visualizer templates for music, effects templates for speech, or specific clients, experimenting with different settings and options is key to mastering these effects. Don't be afraid to go back and forth and try new things, as it may lead to discovering new possibilities that you may not have considered before.
Many of you have probably seen some cool examples of audio visualization on Youtube.
There are services that can produce really nice visualizations for you at a cost. For example Another popular approach is to use Adobe After Effects -an-after-effects-audio-spectrum-visualizer/
The first step is to download and install FFmpeg on your computer. FFmpeg is available for various operating systems including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Visit the official FFmpeg website ( ) and follow the instructions for your specific platform to download the latest release. Once downloaded, run the installer and follow the on-screen prompts to complete the installation.
Once installed, FFmpeg requires some additional configuration. On Windows, you need to add the FFmpeg directory to your system's PATH variable. To do this, right-click on "This PC" or "My Computer," select "Properties," click on "Advanced system settings," and then press the "Environment Variables" button. Under the "System variables" section, locate the "Path" variable, click "Edit," and add the path to the FFmpeg bin directory.
Given an audio file, there is a pretty simple command that you can use to get started on a basic visualiser video.
FFmpeg has a built-in command to create a waveform from a given audio track. So download the sample song and put it in a location on your computer. Or copy your own file to a known location and then try this command:
This effectively wraps the original video in a semicircle and repeats the pattern to form a complete circle. The geq filter allows you to map the pixels from the original video to new pixel locations in the new video. In this case we are using trigonometric calculations to map the points. The result is a circular video with a black background and an alpha (transparent) channel. So if you overlay this video onto another, the background will be transparent and the background video will show through.
I'm a software engineer at Splash. My speciality is sound and music computing, and have a master's degree in that area from Queen Mary University of London. In my spare time I foster cats, record music, play guitar and pickleball.
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