General information
Libvisual is a library that acts as a middle layer between applications that want audio visualization, and audio visualization plugins. It is middleware aimed at providing a common interface between application developers with a need for audio visualization and developers who write visualizations.
As an application developer, using Libvisual provides you an easy way to do audio visualization. When using Libvisual you'll have easy access to all the visualizations that are written for Libvisual.
As a plugin writer, Libvisual provides a nice host for your plugin. It runs analysis over the audio input used and handles everything necessary to display visualizations.
The Libvisual project began sometime in March 2004 and developed over time by a team of talented hackers. The framework core was designed and largely written by then project founder and leader Dennis Smit (synap), with valuable Contributing by Chong Kai Xiong (descender), Duilio J. Protti, Vitaly V. Bursov, Jaak Rendmets (jaak), Jean-Christophe Hoelt, Sepp Wijnands and others too numerous to list. Much of the included plugins in libvisual-plugins are visualization code ported over from other applications.
Sporting two major releases in the first year, initial development was steady and furious. This changed abruptly after the 0.4.0 release as Dennis' energy and time became consumed with his new company business. With the effort largely abandoned, Scott Sibley (starlon) kept the flame alive for years, acting as de facto maintainer as he continued hacking LV to support his LCD projects.
Scott would go on to put LV on his Android phone in early 2011 and refuel interest among old-time developers and users. Project activity soared to a new high and continues sporadically to today. As of 2012, Kai Xiong (descender) is the active project maintainer and primary developer, with much help from Daniel Hiepler (rigid). The LV codebase is currently undergoing a revamp to bring it up to speed with modern standards and practices. We aim to release a development snapshot in the upcoming months. All are welcome to join and contribute!
Our dear friend, musician and hacker Scott Sibley passed away on 2 December 2011, age 38. Scott single-handedly resurrected the project with his adaptation of LV to Android and was instrumental in kick-starting modern LV. The next major release, 0.6.0 "Great Scott!" is named in his memory. He is greatly missed.