Download Visualiser

[Ellyn Krucke]

WheneverI hear someone suggest that a visualiser has not been effective for them the first thing I do is check out where it is. If your visualiser is somewhere like this one, you are going to struggle no matter what you try to do with it.

Mine sits on top of a filing cabinet to one side of my board like a podium. I can stand up to use it, face the group and interact with my board without moving from that spot and it has transformed my teaching.

A number of colleagues followed this guidance and made use of other furniture they had in their rooms but still applying the principles of standing, at the front and within arms length of their board and reported similar positive impact on their practice. If you can get your visualiser up off your desk so you can use it in the location you usually deliver instructions from then I highly recommend you do it.

The use of mini whiteboards here has been the greatest revelation for me about this stage in the modelling process. For example, I have students draft an annotation sentence for a phrase in a poem on their boards, then agree a best sentence as a pair and sometimes even a best attempt as a table of 4. When we collect feedback as a whole group we are then looking for common best practice to create a model under the visualiser that we can then all commit to our books (me included) and ensure that everyone understands why it succeeds.

Ultimately I am looking to support with minimal scaffolding, however I only strip a layer of support away when 80% of the group are ready for it. Here are two examples of groups taught the same thing on the same day but at different stages of scaffolding removal.

The reason I created this Visualisers grouping class was because I thought it would be more efficient to have only one audio AudioIODeviceCallback for multiple visualiser objects to receive at once, instead of a AudioIODeviceCallback for each individual visualiser object. I do not know if this is actually more efficient.

This is where I feel the most unsure about what I am doing.

When thinking about visualiser implementations, my first thought is that I should NOT use any locks or JUCE CriticalSections. I watched an audio talk where @timur talked about how all audio programming should be lock-free.

If you only use one buffer, you either lock it (bad) or you will get screen tearing while visualizing it. You will also have problems with visualizations that require a any synchronization or chronology (filters).

Notice this is from an audio plugin perspective, things change if you dont have to make space for a lot of other things (ie., the main thread). Another thing to realize is that software rendering will only get you so far in terms of efficiency.

No problem. No, I was referring to rendering graphics on the CPU, ie. the standard way of doing this. Using hardware acceleration can offload some tasks like rendering huge amounts of lines to the GPU. Note that this can be achieved automatically to some degree by using the OpenGLContext class.

Does anyone else when trying to use the 3D visualiser find it occasionally becomes really slow and cant process all the actions you want it to do. Even simple things it struggles with sometimes, such as a dimmer chase, I get its not anything like Vectorworks Vision, but it should still run smoothly surely.

Hi Micheal. Sorry wasn't very specific in the last post. Hardware wise I am referring to the GrandMA3 Light, the built in 3D visualiser just becomes a bit slow and can't cope with some effects very well. It seems in most show files I put together to be a bit slow. Currently the desk is running a slightly older software version of MA3 1.0.0.3, so does need updating, which I haven't done as its on rental currently.

There used to be a setting in Advanced preferences where you would tick "Display Visualiser Full Screen" so that whenever you started the visualiser it would automatically go full screen. Although Apple Help files still refer to this preference, in both my iMacs's iTunes it is absent.

That Preference has been gone for a while. Now you have to go iTunes Menu Bar/View/Show Visualizer. Even with that, it may not open in full screen and you additionally have to go back to View/Enter Full Screen. What use to be simple is no longer. ?

MenuBar->View->Show Visualizer or [cmd]+T for Mac will result in a Fullscreen Visualizer on an own space while you can switch back to the iTunes Space choosing another track and go back to the Visualier Space

I was then able to go back and forth to the Visualizer and stay in Full Screen. And, I was able to quit iTunes/reopen and get directly back to full screen Visualizer by simply selecting View/Show Visualizer

Thanks guys - at last a response (from all the places I've been asking about this for months on end), much appreciated. I really do despair about Apple at the moment. The fact that they are removing features from OS and apps that can serve no logical purpose whatsoever defeats me. Why remove this feature?

To toggle between the two modes, you need to change from one to the other while the visualiser is on using the Ctrl Cmd F shortcut. Once the visualiser has been set to windowed or full screen then it will remain at that setting using Cmd T.

For completeness I will also ad that as long as you use the Cmd T shortcut to enter and exit full screen visualiser mode, then it will exit to normal iTunes song listings directly from the full screen visualiser and back to the full screen visualiser from the song listings mode.

However if you use the esc key to exit the full screen visualiser then it will exit from full screen visualiser to windowed visualiser you will then have to press Cmd T to return to the song listing window. But now because you exited using the escape key the windowed mode is now the default and pressing Cmd T will go back to visualiser window mode.

It is possible that Apple decide to put the full screen or windowed visualiser mode back into the preferences. The advantage of having it set as a preference is that the escape key can be used to exit without it resetting the preference. This is a better way of doing it because using the escape key to exit full screen mode is the default action for every other app so it's natural to do this.

So annoyingly you have to break the habit in iTunes otherwise you have to keep resetting it. I think this is an unforseen error on Apple's part and it is likely to be fixed by either putting it back into the preferences OR escaping from full screen visualiser directly to the song listings as it would do with Cmd T, in a future update.

Click on the Help menu in Itunes. That's H-E-L-P. Are you following so far? Ok.. no you're in System Preferences... Open Itunes... Alright... No, it's the blue circle Icon with the music note Inside. Alright now at the top of the screen you will see different menu options labeled "File", "Edit", Etc..... No, not the playback control, right underneath that. Alright now see the Help section, alright scroll over what says Help, one more time that's H-E-L-P (HELP), and click on "KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS". Hope this helps

Disco Bob - you ROCK! answered my question on how to get iTunes 11 to toggle from full screen to just the window - cause sometimes we don't want the whole dang screen looking psychedelic - hear that apple? Don't dumb stuff down for the masses. Keep the back door open!

I received a request on the youtube video to produce a visualiser that could be used side by side with Sonic Pi, rather than occupying the whole screen and using Sonic Pi in transparent mode. I have now altered the original processing file so that it works in a resizable window, so you can set it any size you wish, and even drag it to a second monitor if you wish. There is an article with code links here

VisualiserResizable28801800 795 KB

The audio is fed to a fast fourier transform using the processing minim library which produces a frequency component distributed amplitude to control the size of the shapes drawn. I also have osc messages control further aspects, rotation, shifting, shape selection etc.

Yes I think it probably can all be done in OSC. I used an existing audio driven processing patch as a basis to produce the shapes and modified this considerably. I might take a look at OSC only sometime, but got my eldest Son and Grandchild arriving from Switzerland to stay tomorrow, so not soon.

I was thinking about contributing via patreon (and other ways:) and also reading the build instructions as very interested in gleaning as much info as possible (and also overly ambitious with Endless ideas of feature requests)

To use OSC with it is a bit more involved. You need to need to get hydra-osc from github, download and compile it and also install npm so it is a bit trickier to get going. I would advise using midi initially which is much easier.

One possible point of confusion. The inbuilt version in Tech 5 can create an external browser display. However, this is generated from Tech 5 and is NOT the same as the version running in hydra.ojack.xyz so you cant add the midi or osc additions.

When I run the Update Mesh Now from the Bed Visualiser it comes back with something that looks fairly hideous. In case the picture I'm trying to post doesn't appear it's also available here (google docs) Min is -.206 max is .745 so I'm nearly 1mm out. Looking at the graph I think that it's low on the far left corner (0,220) and high on the front right (220,0).

However, it doesn't seem to matter how slowly I wind the nuts, what I do doesn't seem to impact the graph how I expect it too. I think the nut and bolt are a 1mm pitch so in my head, looking at that picture I need to turn the back left screw anti(counter) clock about 1/4 turn and the front right half a turn clockwise (just less).

It's possible that you are also adjusting the wrong screw if you haven't oriented the visualization to the real world. What I typically recommend to people is manually level your bed first the old school way with paper/feeler gauge. Then place something with some thickness in the front right corner and run an update mesh process. This will then tell you if the plugin is rendering correctly. If the bump doesn't show in the graph in the front right use the various flip options in the plugin's settings to account for that.

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