views:

124

answers:

2

I'm trying to find the best approach to build a music visualizer to run in a browser over the web. Unity3D is an option, but I'll need to build a custom audio import/analysis plugin to get the end user's sound output. Quartz does what I need but only runs on Mac/Safari. WebGL seems not ready. Raphael is mainly 2D, and there's still the issue of getting the user's sound... any ideas? Has anyone done this before?

+2  A: 

By WebGL being "not ready", I'm assuming that you're referring to the penetration (it's only supported in WebKit and Firefox at the moment).

Other than that, equalisers are definitely possible using HTML5 audio and WebGL. A guy called David Humphrey has blogged about making different music visualisers using WebGL and was able to create some really impressive ones. Here's some videos of the visualisations (click to watch):

Brian McKenna
Thanks - that's incredibly helpful. :)
nico
+1  A: 

Depending on complexity you might be interested in trying out Processing (http://www.processing.org), it has really easy tools to make web-based apps, and it has tools to get the FFT and waveform of an audio file.

Arjun