That includes music you play on Spotify or YouTube, any local audio files, and even the audio input from a microphone. The method we're about to outline will allow you to take any audio input your Windows computer can pull in and output it as a Winamp visualization. With the history we just covered in mind, it's no wonder that all these years later, people still have a soft spot for Geiss and other early Winamp music visualizers.įortunately, if you wish you could enjoy some of those classic Winamp visualizations alongside your modern music collection without resorting to rebuilding your Spotify playlist from a mish-mash of ripped MP3 files, you're in luck.īy leveraging a hidden and lesser-known function in Winamp, we can pull in audio from external sources and pass it through the Winamp system-which means the audio visualizer plugins can process it and give us the colorful light show we crave.īetter yet, we're not just limited to a specific streaming audio source or even internet-based audio sources at all.

We recommend setting the video quality to 1080p for the full effect. Below is a sample video we plucked off YouTube where a fan of the Milkdrop visualizer recorded the output while playing a progressive house playlist. The pictures we've included are certainly interesting to look at, but if a picture is worth a thousand words in the case of music visualizers, a video is worth even more. The Geiss plugin was downloaded by millions of Winamp fans and proved to be so popular that Nullsoft, the company behind Winamp, hired Ryan to write even more music visualizer plugins, including a much more powerful followup to Geiss called Milkdrop.

We can say with confidence quite a few people-author included-listened to a lot of techno in the early 2000s with that as a visual backdrop. The liquid metal flow and waveform overlay, seen in the screenshot above, was among the various modes Geiss would play in and readily identifiable to fans of the plugin.

That same year programmer Ryan Geiss created the eponymous Geiss plugin for Winamp.

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