pulse-visualizer - Audio Visualizer

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What Even Is This?

Ever wanted to see your music? Pulse is a real-time audio visualizer inspired by MiniMeters. It turns whatever your system is playing into eye-candy (or at least, that's the idea). Built in C++ with SDL3, OpenGL, PulseAudio, and FFTW, Pulse tries to make your music look as cool as it sounds. Unless your system sucks, then, well, good luck.

Features

• Experimental colorful beam
• Real-time, low-latency audio visualization
• CRT phosphor emulation with GPU compute shaders (glow, persistence, all the retro stuff)
  • Curved screen, vignette, grain, chromatic aberration (toggle as you like)
  • Blur, light spread, and overdrive are all tweakable
• Multiple visualizer styles:
  • Lissajous curve (with fancy spline interpolation and stretch modes)
  • Oscilloscope (gradient modes, pitch following, cycle limiting)
  • FFT/Constant-Q (mid/side, right/left, sharp/flat note key)
  • Spectrogram (log/linear scale, interpolation)
  • Peak and LUFS (shortterm, momentary, integrated)
  • VU meter (digital and analog)
• Configurable order at runtime
• Settings menu (press m to open)
• Separate FFT/CQT threads for mid/side channels
• Extensive SIMD (AVX2) acceleration
• Live config and theme hot-reloading (no restart needed, mostly)
• Draggable splitters for custom layout
• Cross-platform: PulseAudio and PipeWire
• Hardware-accelerated graphics (OpenGL)
• A pile of ready-made themes (see themes/)

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

Just grab it from the AUR as pulse-visualizer-git:

yay -S pulse-visualizer-git

NixOS

Download pulse-visualizer.nix and add this to your flake:

nixpkgs.config.packageOverrides = pkgs: {
  pulse-visualizer = pkgs.callPackage ./pulse-visualizer.nix { };
};

environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.pulse-visualizer ];

Nix

Change directory to the project root and add it to your shell via:

nix-shell

Other Distros

You can get the binary from the Releases page. There is an install script in the tarball, make sure to run it as root before running the binary:

tar -xvf pulse-visualizer-<version>.tar.gz
cd pulse-visualizer-<version>
chmod +x install.sh
sudo ./install.sh

Dependencies & Platform Support

• SDL3
• PulseAudio or PipeWire (0.3+)
• FFTW3
• FreeType2
• OpenGL
• GLEW
• YAML-CPP
• libebur128

Works on:

• Linux (PulseAudio or PipeWire)
• BSD (PulseAudio)
• Windows (WASAPI)

Configuration

pulse-visualizer now has a settings menu! You can open it by pressing m. You can also edit the config file directly.

For comprehensive configuration documentation, see CONFIGURATION.md.

Theming

You can pick a theme in the Window page in the settings menu.

You can also create your own themes by copying a template and editing the colors. Theme files support a bunch of color and property keys (see _TEMPLATE.txt for all options). All the main colors are required. You can fine-tune visualizer-specific stuff too. Theme and config changes reload live.

Usage

Just run:

pulse-visualizer

• Drag splitters to resize/rearrange visualizers
• Lissajous will enforce a square aspect ratio
• Hover FFT for real-time frequency, dB, and note readout
• All config and theme changes are live, no restart needed

Building

If you want to build from source, you can do so with the following commands:

Build dependencies

• C++17 compiler
• CMake 3.10+
• Ninja-build
• Development headers for: SDL3, PulseAudio or PipeWire (0.3+), FFTW3, FreeType2, GLEW, YAML-CPP, libebur128

Fedora: sudo dnf5 install SDL3-devel fftw3-devel freetype-devel glew-devel yaml-cpp-devel ninja pipewire-devel libebur128-devel
Debian: sudo apt install clang cmake libsdl3-dev libfftw3-dev libfreetype-dev libglew-dev libyaml-cpp-dev ninja libebur128-dev

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
ninja
sudo ninja install

Note

Do not build with sudo ninja install. This will cause ownership and permission issues. Please run the build as a regular user (ninja) and only use sudo ninja install for the install step.

Contributing & Support

Want to help? PRs welcome! Please clang-format your code before submitting (see the clang-format file). Sorry for the chaos.

See CONTRIBUTORS for a list of contributors to this project.

If you like pulse-visualizer, you can buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/beacrox.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

• MiniMeters for inspiration
• Richard Andersson for the Phosphor effect
• JetBrains and the Nerd Fonts project for the JetBrains Mono Nerd Font
• SDL3, PulseAudio, PipeWire, FFTW, FreeType, libebur128, YAML-CPP, and everyone else who made this possible