Milkdrop!
Posted by [2404]jf3t August 08, 2005
Ahh, Milkdrop. . .
There is no doubt that Linux has shown that open-source can be commercialized, successful, and accepted. Winamp, in my opinion, however, has had an even larger impact in the way digital entertainment is marketed and delivered. While SAP and others fight over the legality of lines and lines of code minutiae, Winamp was the proverbial butterfly’s wings that created a hurricane.
When Mpeg-3 encoding was first released, Winamp became the first application to embrace the new standard and also allowed “ripping” of digital music from CDs into the MP3 format. Most importantly Winamp was--and remains to this day--free of charge. Suddenly millions of computer users were creating, in essence, their own “mix tapes” on their computers. This warehousing of vast stores of diverse MP3s eventually let to the illegal file sharing mess that Napster stepped in earlier. . .and others are stepping in now.
The beauty of Winamp was its invitation to have users modify, improve, and submit improvements back to Nullsoft. This lead to websites hosting skins, led to the first visualizations, and eventually led to Milkrdrop--a complier of sorts for mathematical equations that spits out visualizations. Milkdrop reminds me of the early freeware raytracers: you type in text files describing what you want to see and how you want to manipulate it and the--command line, by the way--ray tracer would produce a targa graphic for you, Milkdrop works in much the same way, and most of the fun comes from tweaking a sine function here, or adding a higher bass threshold to an if statement there and watching the result--some of which may be as completely unexpected as it is completely cool.
Milkdrop and its companion site both have the necessary executables and downloads to get anyone curious started. Also, they have two brief user’s guides to get the interested off and running designing their own visualizations. The guides aren’t as complete as one would hope, but a natural curiosity and a solid read-through of the materials present will fill in any gaps. The learning curve can be a bit steep, but don’t let that be a roadblock to trying this very interesting utility. If you have ever wanted to try your hand at programming your own visualization, take Milkdrop for a spin. The download comes with several hundred preset files, so even if you don’t care to create your own, getting a free collection of very well done visualizations is definitely worth the download.
Personally, I am having a blast with Milkdrop. It satisfies my split engineer-artist personality to a tee. I can play with equations, do some easy coding, and watch the pretty lights I’ve made. I have created five so far…three really cool, two pretty good, and one of dubious quality, but have had a blast doing all of them. If I’ve been absent from my usual 2404 haunts, it’s because I’ve been listening to too much Rammstien, staying up too late, and creating some wicked-arse visuals with Milkdrop.
Also, if you are a Windows Media user, there is a visualization available known as TwistedPixel that will allow you to read Milkdrop files.
Give it try! And look for my presets--below--under the KnobBros name!
jf3t's presets.zip
