Experience psychedelic and mesmerizing visuals by transforming music into equations that render into a limitless array of user-contributed visualizations.
projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop by Geiss in a more modern, cross-platform reusable library.
Its purpose in life is to read an audio input and to produce mesmerizing visuals, detecting tempo, and rendering advanced equations into a limitless array of user-contributed visualizations.
This repository now only contains the projectM shared/static library. All frontends, plug-ins and other tools were outsourced into separate repositories. If you're not a developer and just look for a download to run projectM visuals on your machine or device, please use one of the links listed below. The releases section in this repository only contains source-code and binary releases of the projectM development libraries and headers, which aren't useful for end users.
Important: projectM is currently undergoing heavy development, so the available end-user frontends are either outdated or unavailable. We've released a few development previews, which are not feature-complete and may have bugs. As soon as we've finished the current modernization of libprojectM, we'll release new and tested versions of most of the frontends listed below, while we may remove or replace some of those which are no longer maintained by their original developers.
- Standalone (currently only available as a development preview)
- Steam (Same as standalone development preview)
- Windows Store (Old 3.1.12 release )
- Standalone (currently only available as a development preview)
- Steam (Old 3.1.12 release)
- Music.app Plugin (currently only available as an unsigned development preview)
- Brew (Old 3.1.12 release)
- Standalone (currently only available as a development preview for Ubuntu 22.04 and compatible distributions)
- Steam (Same as standalone development preview)
Or check your distribution's package manager for a binary release. If it is outdated, please contact the package maintainer, as the projectM development team does not maintain any of the distribution-specific packages.
Note: Both the free and paid apps plus the Android TV app are not created or supported by the projectM developers! If you have technical troubles or other inquiries, please contact the app author via the means provided in the Play Store. Any bug reports in the projectM issue tracker regarding the apps will be closed immediately.
- Windows Store (Old 3.1.12 release)
Source code and other resources, mostly aimed at developers.
- Library source code (this repository)
- Qt5 based PulseAudio and JACK desktop apps as source code for Linux, currently broken and needs some updating (help wanted!).
- ALSA, XMMS, Winamp, JACK (legacy 2.x sources for historic purposes, unmaintained since 2012)
The preset files define the visualizations via pixel shaders and Milkdrop-style equations and parameters.
The projectM library does not ship with any presets. The frontends come with varying preset packs which can be found in separate repositories in the projectM repository list:
- Base Milkdrop texture pack - Recommended for use with any preset pack!
- Cream of the Crop Pack - A collection of about 10K presets compiled by Jason Fletcher. Currently, projectM's default preset pack.
- Classic projectM Presets - A bit over 4K presets shipped with previous versions of projectM.
- Milkdrop 2 Presets - The original preset collection shipped with Milkdrop and Winamp.
- En D Presets - About 50 presets created by "En D".
Included with projectM are the bltc201, Milkdrop 1 and 2, projectM, tryptonaut and yin collections. You can grab these presets here.
You can also download an enormous 41,000 preset pack of presets here (123MB zipped).
Kodi (formerly XBMC)
Helix
Silverjuke (FOSS Jukebox)
VLC Media Player (AKA VideoLAN Client)
Reminder: These are all third-party integrations of libprojectM and not developed or supported by the projectM development team. Please report bugs in those applications to their respective developers.
See BUILDING.md and the developer documentation in the wiki.
At its core projectM is a library, libprojectM. This library is responsible for parsing presets, analyzing audio PCM data with beat detection and FFT, applying the preset to the audio feature data and rendering the resulting output with OpenGL. It can render to a dedicated OpenGL context or a texture.
To get started using projectM in your own projects, please go to the wiki and read the developer documentation available there.
There are some open-source applications that make use of libprojectM which can be found in the projectM organization's repositories and elsewhere.
- Improve projectM using the recently-released Milkdrop source (WIP).
- Update the various implementations using libprojectM.
- Update downstream projects with new versions.
Report issues on GitHub in the respective repositories:
- Rendering issues, crashes or the libprojectM core/API
- Standalone SDL app (including the Steam release)
- Windows Store App
- Apple Music plug-in
- Issues regarding the projectM Android apps in the Play Store, please contact the app author via the Play Store. We cannot help with any problems or requests.
If unsure, post your issue in the main libprojectM issue tracker. Please always check any existing issues if your problem has already been posted by another user. If so, add your logs and findings to the existing issue instead of opening a new ticket.
If you would like to help improve this project, either with documentation, code, porting, hardware or anything else please let us know! We gladly accept pull requests and issues.
Before starting to write code, please take your time to read the contribution guidelines in our wiki.
If you maintain packages of libprojectM, we are happy to work with you! Please note well:
- The main focus of this project is libprojectM. It's a library that only really depends on OpenGL. The other applications are more like examples and demos.
- Many of the frontend applications are likely outdated and of less utility than the core library. If you desire to use them or depend on them, please file an issue in the respective repository so we can help update them.
- The "canonical" application for actually viewing the visualizations is now projectM-SDL, based on libSDL2 because it supports audio input and is completely cross-platform.
- If you like Rust, there is a SDL3 rust frontend in the works looking for contributors.
- This is an open source project! If you don't like something, feel free to contribute improvements!
- Yes, you are looking at the official version. This is not a fork.
The core projectM library is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1 to keep any changes open-sourced, but also enable the use of libprojectM in closed-source applications (as a shared library) as long as the license terms are adhered to. The up- and downstream projects may use different licenses - please check all parts of the software to be compatible with your specific project if you plan an integration.
More information for developers is available from the projectM Wiki.