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, etc)
  • Curved screen, vignette, grain, chromatic aberration (toggle as you like)
  • Blur, light spread, and overdrive are all configurable
  • Reflections on curved screen
• 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, iterative reassignment)
  • 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/)
• Plugin support

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

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

yay -S pulse-visualizer-git

NixOS

Use the unstable channel for packages:

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

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
• SDL3_image
• PulseAudio or PipeWire (0.3+)
• FFTW3
• FreeType2
• OpenGL
• YAML-CPP
• libebur128
• libcurl

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.

Plugin Support

Pulse has experimental plugin support.
Plugins are .so/.dll files dropped into ~/.config/pulse-visualizer/plugins/ on linux and C:\Users\<username>\.config\pulse-visualizer\plugins on Windows and can draw using a small rendering API, handle SDL events, and access config/theme data.

See PLUGINS.md for details on the plugin lifecycle, required symbols, and the PvAPI interface.

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++20 compiler
• CMake 3.10+
• Ninja-build
• Development headers for: SDL3, SDL3_image, PulseAudio or PipeWire (0.3+), FFTW3, FreeType2, YAML-CPP, libebur128, libcurl

Fedora: sudo dnf5 install SDL3-devel SDL3_image-devel fftw3-devel freetype-devel yaml-cpp-devel ninja pipewire-devel libebur128-devel libcurl-devel
Debian: sudo apt install clang cmake libsdl3-dev libsdl3-image-dev libfftw3-dev libfreetype-dev libyaml-cpp-dev ninja libebur128-dev libcurl-dev

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

NixOS:

• If you want to try out the latest version:

git clone https://github.com/Audio-Solutions/pulse-visualizer
cd pulse-visualizer
nix-shell

• To install download pulse-visualizer.nix and add this to your configuration.nix

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

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

• With flakes:

inputs.pulse-visualizer.url = "github:Audio-Solutions/pulse-visualizer";

environment.systemPackages = [ pulse-visualizer.packages.${system}.default ];

# or
nixpkgs.overlays = [ pulse-visualizer.overlays.default ];
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.pulse-visualizer ];

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