With Mac OS X Tiger, Apple introduced a convenient way to create your own graphical effects: The Quartz Composer. Sadly, by default, these could only be used as screen saver or run in Quicktime. With iVisualize (freeware, Universal) it is finally possible to run these in iTunes, have them react to your music and display song information. iVisualize comes with four visualizations and you can download more (here) or create your own.
The visualizations iVisualize is shipped with are all custom made:
• Drift (default) from Jim McKay http://www.pidog.com – Calm visualization that runs fast on every machine and has been made by Jim who was totally new to Quartz Composer and so can you
• BeComposed from Édouard Puginier http://www.tazintosh.com – An elegant calm visualization featuring a most thing iVisualize has to offer
• Cities of the future 2.0 from Roger Bolton http://www.eskatonia.com – Even though this looks like the glooming New York Skyline of 2050 it still is your music
• iVestream from PCheese http://www.pcheese.net – PCheese extended his already famous SoundStream to a real iVisualization plugin
More info and download link here.
More info about Quartz Composer from MacDevCenter here.
From Apple:
Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. Its visual programming environment is suited for:
• Developing graphics processing modules without writing a single line of code
• Exploring the visual technologies available in Mac OS X without needing to learn the application programming interface (API) for that technology
Quartz Composer brings together a rich set of graphical and nongraphical technologies, including Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which is a lightweight XML format. You use Quartz Composer to create compositions, which are graphical programs. Compositions can run autonomously, or you can incorporate them into an application. You can play back and interact with a composition from within an application by using a very straightforward runtime API or without any code at all by using a QCView, which is provided on the Quartz Composer palette in Interface Builder. Quartz Composer compositions are fully compliant with the Cocoa controller layer and key-value bindings, allowing you to combine Interface Builder and Quartz Composer to rapidly develop data-driven visualizations.
The Quartz Composer application is located in: /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/
More info here.
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