Few examples Milkdrop presets.

Nobody said learning is easy... Had to rebuild the visual pipe, and reactive layers but coming together.

Milkdrop (MD1 | MD2) - Done.

GLSL - Done

WebGPU - Next (/cry)

Anyone using the current version is in for a treat on the next release.

Hello 11 Fantastic Members!

If you've been following along you know I've been working hard, with my buddy Claude, making a cool music visualizer for Windows/PC (sorry mac people, maybe one day). The last two days have been quite the ride resulting in an entire rebuild of the visual layer.

What does that mean? I hope someone can explain it to me....

Refactored IKANDY's render path from per-scene canvases (35 separate WebGL contexts, each scene owning its own pipeline) to a unified HDR FBO + post-FX chain. Every scene now renders into a shared linear HDR target and routes through one composited output stack.

What that unlocked:

• Unified post chain CA, FXAA, bloom (5-level pyramid, UnrealBloom-style), per-scene LUTs (32³), 7 tonemap curves (NONE/Reinhard/ACES/AGX/Filmic/Hejl/PBR Neutral), vignette, grain. Applied uniformly to every scene.
• Metadata-driven scene system Each scene is now a small declarative module (id, category, hints, audio, textures, fragment source). Five internal categories: fragment, three, webgpu, canvas2d, milkdrop. Runtime dispatches based on category. Schema-validated.
• Audio event system Beat / transient / onset / energy / tempo detection. Scenes subscribe via audioEvents: ['beat', 'transient'] in metadata, get pulse uniforms (u_beat, u_transient, etc.) that decay over frames. Beyond just bass/mid/treble.
• Auto-detection probes Tonemap, exposure, and black point auto-detected per scene by sampling HDR output at first activation. Cached to localStorage. No manual per-scene tuning required.
• Overlay compositor Sparks, light leaks, beat flashes as a sprite layer above scene render. Per-scene declared, globally toggleable.
• Visual regression harness Reference snapshots per scene captured deterministically (fixed time, synthetic audio). Legacy vs pipeline comparison automated. Multi-frame contact sheets + audio-reactive variant per scene. Will hook into CI.

The big bug: Each ported scene had its own aces_approx + sqrt baked into its FS. Pipeline was applying its own clamp + linearToSRGB on top. Double-encoding lifted darks (navy → magenta) and crushed highlights. Fix was selfTonemapped: true in metadata + a passthrough mode in the tonemap/output passes. Restored byte-equivalent output to legacy across all 11 ported scenes.

Where it goes: Three.js category (trails) ported through the unified runtime. Canvas2D category landed (ripple, waveray, pawrticles). WebGPU slot reserved for v1.x via Naga GLSL→WGSL when a scene actually needs compute. AI-generated and ShaderToy imports go through the same schema, get the full post chain for free.

tldr: It's starting to look good but we still need a cat visual. Not easy.

PS. Bats I'm coming for that 10/10, give me a few more days!

Did I tell you guys I added Spout? Oh yeah, that too...

Stay tuned...

I would have had a difficult time answering this a few weeks ago. This started as a personal project to make visuals for Spotify using the original Ryan Geiss Milkdrop files. Then a very nice gentleman reached out who was a foobar user, and I thought "can I add foobar too?" A few weeks later I had a music visualizer that worked with all music related applications, including Firefox, and integrated API where I could to offer advanced features for certain applications.

Ok, but now what? I stumbled across three.js shaders on Shadertoy and thought these are really cool, can I use these? So I found a few examples and to my surprise it worked. So I started looking around on Reddit at examples of other art available and found WebGPU, and you guessed it, I wondered "can I add that too?" And it worked.

So here I have an app that syncs to any music device and has the capability to run Milkdrop, GLSL, and WebGPU visuals, but sadly I wasn't satisfied. How was I going to load a catalog complete enough to satisfy users? I don't even know how to make this art, I just know how to load it.

So working with my buddy Claude I asked, could I integrate AI to help anyone create GLSL or WebGPU? Well, Claude my bff who never says "no" told me sure... and it worked!

One of the more interesting things I experienced in this journey is "how the hell do I contact these artists?" Boy I've tried, and to the few of you I've personally reached out to, I'm sorry. I've done an awful job explaining, and as you can tell have a tendency to ramble. So here it is.

If I pay so much for Spotify to listen to music why can't artists make art that's easily accessible and usable by the community? I've hooked up AI to help create both GLSL and WebGPU visuals, or load .MILK files, so anyone can make them. When you use Suno the only thing you see is AI curated content, but I want to give artists the chance to compete against that and feature what they can do. The best man wins will be featured in IKANDY, and possibly sold as a pack through Steam's Workshop. (FYI - In all fairness, what artists make can be much better than what AI creates, but there's no game if I just say that..)

This will be released as a beta in approximately a month, and I've always stuck to privacy trumps all, so the beta access will be offered in a unique way that doesn't include your email address.

If you made it this far - thanks. I still don't know if 6 people will think this is cool, or more? We'll find out soon! Good luck and have fun.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." - Ferris Bueller

...deciding if this is worth building out.

I've been working on a music visualizer (Electron + WebGL, Butterchurn-based) and prototyped a feature where you paste any single-pass Shadertoy mainImage into the app and it runs live with the audio FFT wired to iChannel0. Goes fullscreen, reacts to whatever you're playing.

About 30-40% of Shadertoy shaders work without modification. Multi-pass, buffers, cubemaps, etc. don't and I'm not sure if it's worth solving those. Licensing is also messy since most Shadertoy stuff defaults to CC BY-NC-SA.

Clip attached. Basic test, but you get the idea.

Is this a feature anyone would actually use? Or is the audience for "paste a shader into your visualizer" basically just me and ten other people?

DM me if you'd want to try it...

A couple of big additions in this release.

## ✦ New 3D scene: Trails — by Sabo Sugi

Sabo is back. After Ferrofluid, he's contributed another stunning scene — TRAILS, a fully 3D scene with bending light streams, a curved Tron-style floor, and audio-reactive bloom. It's the first Three.js scene in IKANDY and it looks unreal in motion.

## 🎚️ Audio source + input selection (per your feedback)

The #1 ask from existing users. Now you have full control:

- **4 sources:** Spotify, foobar2000, VLC, Local

- **Local mode** has two capture options:

- **Per-process WASAPI loopback** — pick any specific running audio app (Spotify, browser tab, game, whatever). No more Discord pings or notification bleed in your visualizer.

- **Audio input device picker** — for DJs, audio interfaces, hardware synths, mixers, instruments, mics, virtual cables (VB-Cable, Voicemeeter). Whatever you're routing into your machine, IKANDY can capture it.

Stereo Mix is gone. No more fighting Realtek 7.1 quirks.

---

**Download:** [ikandy.app](https://ikandy.app)

**Source:** [github.com/ikandyapp/ikandyapp.github.io](https://github.com/ikandyapp/ikandyapp.github.io)

Feedback, bug reports, and screenshots welcome.

First 3D scene! Allows mouse movement, and you can mouse through the effects. This was one of the most fun one's yet.

If anyone else is interested in seeing their WEBGL shader come to life with music feel free to reach out.

IKANDY is a free Electron music visualizer I've been building solo. v1.0.11 just shipped with a chunk of reliability + polish work:

Audio

• Killed a sample-rate flap loop that was rebuilding the AudioContext every few seconds when Windows switched playback devices. Turns out the rebuild logic was the flap — browser resamples transparently, no rebuild needed.
• Hardened reconnect verification so it stops declaring success when audio hasn't actually resumed.
• Tuned silence detection so Spotify between-track gaps don't trigger a false reconnect.
• 5.1/7.1 surround Stereo Mix fallback intact (got verified via byte-identical diff on the protected code).

Theme consistency

• Did a full UI sweep for hardcoded accent colors. Sliders, tabs, toggles, scene picker, sidebar headers, FPS meter — all themed surfaces now move with the active theme. ~25+ stray colors fixed.

Preset library

• Smarter visual dedup — bumped fingerprint from 8×8 grayscale to 16×16 color with 2-frame motion capture. Hundreds of presets that were wrongly hidden are back.
• Malformed presets now caught on load instead of crashing playback.

Reactivity scan UX

• Reactivity classification (REACTIVE vs AMBIENT preset filters) now runs silently in the background after app idle, persists across sessions, and saves incrementally so closing mid-scan resumes next launch. No more 30-min "Run Scan" wait.

Free, BYOK Spotify, also works with VLC / foobar2000 / Now Playing.

ikandy.app

This will not improve productivity, it will not manage your tasks, it will most likely waste some time - but if you're willing to try it I bet you'll have fun.

It's a Music/Photo visualizer and works with all audio sources. No more using a visualizer tied to a specific app.

Multi-Monitor support, Mouse effects, draw effects, works with OBS...

Telling people about it shouldn't be this hard. :)

Totally free, totally fun...

GitHub: https://github.com/ikandyapp/ikandy/releases/tag/v1.0.9

Reach out with any questions.

Experience in enterprise software development and shared a few AI songs/vids in the past ( maybe not for everyone :P ).

Grew up as a Geiss fan (winamp visualizer), always loved visualizers, and wanted to see if I could make one using AI.

Here I'm demonstrating what it can do using pictures, though the app is more tailored for music as effects move with music.

This is just a small sample, but you'll get the idea. You might like it better than my music, and I don't blame you.

Cheers!

Free app, works with all windows sources, lots of customization. No personal data, no account, no subscription.... On github https://github.com/ikandyapp/ikandy

Less words this time.

Thanks for your feedback, all valid - "Peace n Love" - Ringo