I make music for therapeutic reasons. I’ve found that immersive visualisations and lights help with this a lot. I’ve already bought a couple of rack-mount spectrum analysers and they are awesome.

Do you know of other devices that provide a similar visual experience? I know there are a bunch of cheap bouncing led bars on ali express and the likes but there is a problem: They work based on microphones. I need to be able to plug them in because I use headphones most of the time.

I know it is kind of niche but any pointers would be appreciated.

  • averyminya@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m interested too but I can’t think of anything outside of DMX setups.

    The only thing that isn’t good enough to be a good suggestion are the Logitech G560 speakers. You could technically plug them in, mute them, and have them react to the audio. But it’s just RGB flashing mostly.

    • ChappIO@waveform.socialOPM
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      1 year ago

      Yeah that’s why I posted the question here. My request seems to be in some kind of niche valley. On the budget side you have these devices with mics that work fine unless you’re using headphones and on the other end of the spectrum there is DMX which looks amazing (because pro) but isn’t “automatic” since you want to program them for live shows.

      If I can’t find anything I will probably invest the time and build something custom like @rkk@lemmy.world suggested.

    • ChappIO@waveform.socialOPM
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      1 year ago

      Oh yeah his videos are always interesting. For now I’ve decided to go with a small DMX setup because of its super low latency.

        • ChappIO@waveform.socialOPM
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          1 year ago

          I haven’t made all the decisions yet but my goal is to have a multi-sensory experience while making music in headphones. Meaning I don’t need a professional light show nor do I want to spend much time programming lights.

          What I am thinking now is I will build a Raspberry Pi based video synth to throw nice visuals on a spare monitor. Then if I want to invest some more I will get a roland vc-1-dmx to convert the raspberry pi hdmi signal to a dmx universe to connect some LED tubes around the studio.

    • ChappIO@waveform.socialOPM
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      1 year ago

      Eyesy looks interesting but the pricing like most things C&G seems off to me. I picked a DMX setup with 2 bright multi-channel LED bars which come out to around 280 bucks total so I think I will be going that route (and learning aother popular live performance tech).

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Not sure how you’d pipe external audio into these, but it might be worth looking at visualizers on PC. Stuff like milkdrop, or whatever format Winamp used to use.

    • ChappIO@waveform.socialOPM
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      1 year ago

      I hadn’t considered additional displays until @risibledog@waveform.social and you mentioned solutions like that. Good idea and worth exploring.

      For now I think I have settled on DMX as it is expandable in the future. I will just need to figure out the audio or midi to DMX situation. But that’s just software I can run on my DAW pc.