In Praise of Music Visualizers (nerdy but beautiful)

For the last five years or so, I've been a pretty die-hard Mac user. But before that, in what I term my "shameful past," I used Windows almost exclusively, even making my own computers.

I rarely look back on those days with any kind of excitement or yearning, but there is one thing Windows (or, more accurately, Winamp, a music player for Windows) has that Mac hasn't had: gorgeous music visualizers.

When I mention music visualizers to long-time Mac users, they just stare at me blankly. And with good reason: iTunes has had shitty music visualizers forever. Really crap, and pretty surprising for a company whose core audience for years was designers, filmmakers and musicians.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side, Winamp (and even Windows Media Player) shipped with beautiful, responsive music visualizers, going all the way back to 1997, when Winamp was first released.

I'm not writing this as a reminiscence or history lesson, much less as a Mac bashing opportunity. I'm writing it to beg, plead, and insist that everyone who runs iTunes 9, whether on a Mac or Windows machine, switch over to it right now, turn on the music visualizer, hit show full screen, and sit in wonder at something lovely and mesmerizing.

Okay, you're back. Great, right?

The basic construct of the visualizer is that one or more emitters emit particles, with our without trails, in constantly changing colors and shapes, and one or more invisible spheres exert gravitational pull on the particles. The three basic units here (emitter, particle, sphere) interact in surprising, beautiful, and frequently unique, ways (I think the variety and complexity of the interactions varies with the abilities of your graphics card, but I first discovered the visualizer on a first-generation MacBook Pro, so anyone who's bought a computer within the last 3 years, at least, should be able to enjoy). The visualizer's responsiveness and variety are so good that it frequently seems like the software "knows" the song, and is anticipating verse, chorus and bridge.

Thanks, Apple, for letting someone really dig in and show off what a music visualizer can do. And thanks also to whoever invented the visualizer to begin with. You rock.

P.S. Hit the ? key while the iTunes visualizer is running for a list of keys you can hit to vary your experience.