![]() Change background opacity if you don't wish to respect alpha in that way. Note that by default, if you made your Alpha clear value 0,0,0,0 (eg., alpha black), you will see a transparent background. All of the starting defaults had a decent amount of time and consideration behind them, it works in 10.5, 10.6, nothing is broken, etc. It should be installed at Developer/Library/QuartzComposer/Templates. I strongly recommend attempting to use the supplied kineme QuartzBuilder template as your starting point. If you did use kineme audio tools, you would have to emulate that in some way using other patches (like smooth, or whatever). There is nothing wrong with the Kineme Audio Tools, it's just not going to give you the same info, or the built in peak smoothing. If you've been relying on Audio Visualizer protocol stuff to "get the spectrum/volume" replace it with the built in Audio patch not the kineme audio tools. Rename.Ĭonversely, find the QuartzBuilder template composition. Wow.Make a new blank composition, that isn't any kind of protocol.Ĭopy all of the stuff that's in your qtz over to that. (Note that was total CPU utilization for everything I was doing at the time, including using iTunes, etc.) Today, on my three-year-old Mac Pro pushing three relatively large displays (1920x1200, 2048x1152, 1680x1050), it takes less than 5% of the CPU power just to run the visualizer, and total CPU load with a similar set of apps running never went over 9% during my testing. Interesting to see that, back in 2002, it took 50% of the CPU power of a 733MHz G4 to do this on a single 1600x1200 screen. We ran the "screen saver in the background" hint many years back, and it's still one of my favorite OS X demonstrations. ![]() If you just want to run a screensaver as a background, you can use the above command to do so - no need to make it an iTunes visualizer as well. [ robg adds: I tested this, and while it works, the frame rate on my 2.66 Quad core Mac Pro, driving three displays, isn't all that good, and the CPU hit is very noticeable. When/if I figure out improvements, I'll post them. I set my desktop so a simple color from the Desktop tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel, in order to save some processor cycles by not painting two large JPGs accross my two displays. The other improvement that could be made is that this solution paints the compostion directly between your desktop icons and your current desktop pattern. First, as noted earlier, is the need to have to run the iTunes visualizer alongside the desktop visualizer. Two improvements that could be made to this technique. All the rest use the Quartz engine, and will send the audio output to the correct listener (for lack of a better word.) You can use any one the visualizers, except for iTunes Visualizer or iTunes Classic Visualizer. Nothing will happen until you turn on the visualizer in iTunes. (I made a new entry into my bash profile to simplify the long command into a more memorable and simpler command, Visualize.) Press Control-C to quit the overlay, or simply close the Terminal window the command is running in, to exit the background screensaver. This sets your selected screen saver as your desktop background. System/Library/Frameworks/amework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background After doing that, in Terminal, issue this command. Then open the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences pane, and set your newly-created screen saver as your screen saver. Then save the edited composition into the Screen Savers folder in your user's Library folder. Still in Quartz Composer, go to Editor » Edit Protocol Conformance, and click both Screen Saver and Music Visualizer. Read on for the how-to if you'd like to see how I did it.įirst, I copied a visualizer (for example, Lathe.qtz) from the Compositions folder in the /System » Library » Compositions folder, and modified it heavily in Quartz Composer (part of XCode) to make it unique. ![]() I have a Quad dual-core, so I don't notice a hit in performance, but I'd prefer this to work cleaner. As far as I can tell (by Googling the techniques that have been detailed elsewhere), this is the only start-to-finish instruction to accomplish responsive music visualization on the desktop.īefore you begin, note that the major issue with this hint is that it requires you have the visualizer running in iTunes in order for the desktop visualizer to work. I've always wanted to have a desktop image that was a live music visualizer. ![]()
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