How to create audio-reactive visualizations for your song

Intro

There’s a lot of AI tools out there and new innovations seem to come from that area. But there’s some good old math-related tech, forgotten in the mist of time, that can make your song come alive. If you were 90’s / 2000’s-kid, you probably remember the app WinAmp. It had some cool visualizations for the music and that visualization engine was later separated from the main app and open-sourced. It was called MilkDrop. Before this, there was no easy way to convert those visualizations to video. Perhaps you’d use OBS studio or similar app to record the video. No longer! You can now use Lyric Video Studio to manage the tens of thousand of presets and generate the visualization from audio directly to the timeline.

The instructions

Fire up the app, create a new project and create audio track, by pressing the + icon on time track or lyrics track
Do one of the following this: Either drag & drop the audio file to the timeline OR hold down ctrl and click the audio track with left mouse to create item. Select the source file from the view that opens to your right
Right click on the audio item and select “Create audio-reactive background”
- On first setup, the app asks you for a folder where to download initial presets pack. You can use own presets as well, just search “Milkdrop presets“
External app will now launch and you see simple UI for controlling things
If you go back to main app and change the playhead position, the external app will follow and preview starts from the same place.
You can add multiple presets to the playlist. Use timeline view to jump to desired tome and select new preset that will start playing at that time
After you are satisfied, click “Render sequence” to turn the visualization to a video in your timeline
That’s it, then all you need to do is click “Render” in the main app and you have yourself non-ai visualization