projectM

ProjectM

projectM is an open-source music visualizer that uses OpenGL and pulseaudio to create real-time visualizations that render alongside audio input. It features advanced real-time effects including per-pixel shaders and beat detection.
projectM image
opensource music visualizer opengl pulseaudio realtime effects shaders beat-detection

ProjectM: Open-Source Music Visualizer

Real-time music visualizer using OpenGL and pulseaudio, featuring advanced real-time effects including per-pixel shaders and beat detection.

What is ProjectM?

projectM is an advanced open-source music visualization software that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It connects to pulseaudio or OpenAL to retrieve audio input from the user's system in real-time and renders stunning interactive visualizations that react to the music.

Some key features of projectM include:

  • Per-pixel OpenGL fragment shaders and textures that enable a wide variety of visualization effects and transitions
  • Beat detection to synchronize effects to the rhythm of the music
  • A customizable UI with preset management, allowing users to tweak parameters or download presets made by others
  • Advanced math capabilities for visualization effects powered by FFTW and complex number math
  • A plugin infrastructure that allows developers to create new visualization effects and data sources using C++ or GLSL shaders
  • Cross-platform support across Windows, macOS, and Linux
  • Touchscreen and multi-monitor support
  • Integration with media players like iTunes and Winamp

If you're looking for mesmerizing, reactive visualizations to accompany your music library, projectM is an excellent open-source option to explore with endless possibilities for new effects through its plugin system and shader-based architecture.

ProjectM Features

Features

  1. Real-time audio visualizations
  2. Per-pixel shaders
  3. Beat detection
  4. Customizable visualizations
  5. Plugin support
  6. Cross-platform

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source

Highly customizable

Great visual quality

Responsive to music

Active community support

Cons

Steep learning curve

Setup can be tricky

Limited documentation

Visualizations take resources


The Best ProjectM Alternatives

Top Audio & Music and Music Visualization and other similar apps like ProjectM


Avee Player icon

Avee Player

Avee Player is a free video player and editor for Windows that makes it easy for anyone to create visually impressive videos. With Avee Player's drag-and-drop interface, users can take video clips, photos, audio files and apply special effects, transitions, texts, stickers and motion graphics with just a few clicks.Key...
Avee Player image
MilkDrop icon

MilkDrop

MilkDrop is an audio visualizer plugin for the Winamp media player developed by Ryan Geiss. It displays animated visuals that react and move with the music being played in Winamp, allowing users to create their own unique visual listening experience.Some key features of MilkDrop include:A large library of pre-made visualizations...
MilkDrop image
Plane9 icon

Plane9

Plane9 is an open source, real-time 3D visualizer program designed to be used as both a music visualizer and video screensaver. It works by taking audio input from the user's computer and displaying reactive, animated 3D graphics and visualizations that correspond to the music in real-time.Some key features of Plane9...
Plane9 image
Visualisator 5000 icon

Visualisator 5000

Visualisator 5000 is a powerful yet easy-to-use data visualization and dashboarding software solution for businesses. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Visualisator 5000 makes it simple for anyone to connect to data sources, build interactive dashboards and share insights with colleagues or customers.Some key features and benefits of Visualisator 5000 include:Flexible,...
Visualisator 5000 image
G-Force icon

G-Force

G-Force is a dynamic music visualizer software designed to create animated visuals that react and dance with the music playing from your computer's media player or live audio input. With its physics-based animation engine, G-Force generates visualizations that burst, bounce, and transform to the frequency peaks and rhythms of your...
G-Force image
BeatDrop icon

BeatDrop

BeatDrop is an open-source music library and playlist manager designed specifically for the rhythm game osu!. It serves as an alternative to the default osu! music library interface, providing enhanced tools for downloading, organizing, and playing beatmaps.Some key features of BeatDrop include:Automatic downloading of beatmaps from listings on the osu!...
BeatDrop image
ZGameEditor Visualizer icon

ZGameEditor Visualizer

ZGameEditor Visualizer is a free, open-source tool for creating interactive 2D games like visual novels, adventure games, RPGs, and more. With its easy drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly build game scenes, characterize sprites, write dialogues, create branching storylines, and add gameplay logic without any coding required.Key features include:Intuitive scene editor...
ZGameEditor Visualizer image
Luminant Music icon

Luminant Music

Luminant Music is a digital audio workstation (DAW) designed specifically for music composition, recording, editing and mixing. With its clean and intuitive interface, Luminant Music allows even novice producers and musicians to easily arrange, edit and mix musical ideas into full songs.Unlike more complex DAWs like Ableton or Logic Pro,...
Kauna icon

Kauna

Kauna is an open-source, cross-platform audio visualizer software that generates animated graphics in real-time based on audio input from a microphone or any other audio source. It supports a wide range of visualization modes including oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, waveform, point cloud, etc.Some of the key features of Kauna include:Supports various...
Kauna image
Music Visualizer Engine icon

Music Visualizer Engine

Music Visualizer Engine is a powerful software tool that creates stunning visualizations that react and dance to the audio fed into it. It works by taking an audio signal as input, analyzing aspects like frequency, amplitude, waveform, and musical features using digital signal processing techniques.The software then translates this audio...
Music Visualizer Engine image
Free Visualizer Music icon

Free Visualizer Music

Free Visualizer Music is a free software that generates visualizations and animations that react to the music you're playing in real-time. It can be a great way to enhance your listening experience or create eye-catching videos and live performances.Some of the key features of Free Visualizer Music include:Customizable visualization templates...
Free Visualizer Music image
Magic  Music Visuals icon

Magic Music Visuals

Magic Music Visuals is a visualizer software for Windows that creates animated visuals that react and sync to the music or audio being played. It offers a diverse range of visualization styles including abstract shapes, flames, particle effects, tunnels, ribbons, and more that pulse, change, and transform with the frequency,...
Magic  Music Visuals image
Morphyre icon

Morphyre

Morphyre is a dynamic, real-time music visualization software for Windows that creates animated visualizations that react and dance to the music played on your computer. It works across various genres and types of music to generate mesmerizing visual effects that pulsate, shift, and transform along with the audio.With an extensive...
Morphyre image
Cli-visualizer icon

Cli-visualizer

cli-visualizer is an open-source command line utility that helps visualize the textual output of other CLI tools and scripts. It captures the text output and automatically generates graphs, charts, and diagrams for the data to make it easier to analyze.Some key features of cli-visualizer include:Support for visualizing outputs from popular...
Cli-visualizer image
Audio Lab icon

Audio Lab

Audio Lab is a digital audio workstation (DAW) designed for recording, editing, and mixing audio. It provides a complete production environment for musicians, podcasters, audio engineers, and other audio content creators.Some key features of Audio Lab include:Multi-track recording up to 128 tracksNon-destructive audio editing with unlimited undoA library of virtual...
Audio Lab image
Cthugha icon

Cthugha

Cthugha is an open-source software library that provides GPU-accelerated video and image processing capabilities. It is designed to make it easy for developers to take advantage of the parallel processing power of modern GPUs for computer vision and video processing tasks.Some key features of Cthugha include:Hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding...
VZX Music Visualizer icon

VZX Music Visualizer

VZX Music Visualizer is a music visualization software for Windows that creates animated visualizations that react and dance along with music playing on your computer. It offers a high level of customizability, allowing you to tweak the visuals to your liking.Some of the key features of VZX Music Visualizer include:Generates...
VZX Music Visualizer image
Rabbit Hole icon

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole is a browser extension that aims to counter mindless browsing and social media addiction. It works by detecting when users fall into loops of endless scrolling on sites like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. and gently intervenes to disrupt the autopilot-like trance.Specifically, Rabbit Hole will periodically prompt introspective questions...
Rabbit Hole image
Audio Glow Music Visualizer icon

Audio Glow Music Visualizer

Audio Glow Music Visualizer is a Windows software application that generates animated visualizations that react and dance to the music playing on your computer. It works by analyzing the audio signals using advanced techniques like fast Fourier transforms and frequency spectrum analysis to break the music down into different frequency...
Audio Glow Music Visualizer image
DADIM icon

DADIM

DADIM is an open-source database design and modeling tool used for visualizing, designing, and prototyping relational databases. It provides an intuitive graphical interface that allows database architects and developers to:Visually design database models using entity relationship diagramsGenerate SQL code for creating databases from the designed modelsReverse engineer existing databases into...
DADIM image
Vivo: Live Wallpapers icon

Vivo: Live Wallpapers

Vivo is a free app for Android devices that offers a wide variety of beautiful animated wallpapers to personalize your phone's background. With over 100 different live wallpaper options ranging from lush forests, serene beaches, cute animals, and abstract art designs, Vivo makes it easy to find eye-catching, animated scenery...
Vivo: Live Wallpapers image
NestDrop icon

NestDrop

NestDrop is an innovative web hosting control panel designed to make server and website management easy for users of all skill levels. It provides a clean, intuitive interface that allows you to fully control all aspects of your hosting without having to touch any code.Some of the key features NestDrop...
NestDrop image
Overture Music Visualization icon

Overture Music Visualization

Overture Music Visualization is an open-source, cross-platform software application that generates animated visualizations synchronized to any audio input. It's designed to transform sound into abstract real-time graphics that pulse, change color, and evolve dynamically with the frequency, amplitude, tempo, and timbre of the music.With an intuitive interface and diverse visualization...
DreamTunes icon

DreamTunes

DreamTunes is a user-friendly music management application designed to help you organize, play, and sync your personal music library across devices. Developed by DreamSoft, DreamTunes combines Music Player, Library Manager, and Sync components all into one intuitive software.Key features of DreamTunes include:Music Player - Play your locally stored music with...
DreamTunes image
APEXvj icon

APEXvj

APEXvj is an open-source visualization and machine learning platform that was purpose-built for computer vision applications and video analysis. It has an easy-to-use graphical user interface that allows you to quickly build computer vision machine learning models without needing to code using a drag and drop workflow interface. It comes...
APEXvj image
Free Antimatter Live Wallpaper icon

Free Antimatter Live Wallpaper

Free Antimatter Live Wallpaper is an animated Android wallpaper app that creates a visualization of antimatter particles floating around the user's screen. It offers a sci-fi, futuristic look by displaying brightly colored particles over customizable backgrounds.Users can choose from multiple pre-made backgrounds like nebulae, galaxies, and tech patterns, or use...
Free Antimatter Live Wallpaper image