Newbee first impressions and questions

[primalfoo]

First off, I'm impressed. I've never been deeply involved in the state of art on music visualization, but I recently decided to look for a solution that would work with my squeezebox. I quickly found out that my only option was to find something that could work as standalone. And, I found Aeon.

Here are some questions and observations:

- in a previous thread I mentioned how I feel that I may not be seeing all the scenes. I'm not sure if that is really the case, but I guess what I'm saying is that I would like to see more variation. I actually found out that if I let each scene take longer (like 1min) it feels much less repetitious.

- I use a motu PCI sound card and it took me quite a while to figure out how to feed the audio to Aeon. I tried unsuccessfully to feed it through my "input" channels. The UI of Aeon didn't make it clear whether it was looking for inputs or outputs in its drop down menu. I finally decided to route my inputs to an output pair (via the internal sound card mixer) and try that, and it worked. I think this should be made more clear that Aeon was looking at the outputs, or better, give an option to use the inputs as well.

- I had to make the output quite hot (and even bump the audio preamp setting) to see good results.

- The UI for settings, especially the slider, could be done better. First off, you can't slide the slider. Second it's hard to set it to a predetermined value.

- I couldn't use the presets to preserve the settings.

- I did occasionally see some text in the upper left corner of the screen, apparently some error messages. It would be nice to be able to disable that.

- sometimes, when the scenes transition, I see a noticeable pause. I have a pretty beefy box, so I imagine a lot of people would be noticing the same.

- And perhaps my biggest issue of all up to this point has been that the visuals seem to be out of sync (delayed) with respect to the audio in real time. I've tried reducing my sound card's internal buffer to a minimum (32 samples). But the delay is still noticeable. I'm thinking about splitting the audio and artificially delaying the stream that directly hits the receiver, but that's a bit too extreme.

Any thoughts or feedback are welcome. Still a great product. Thanks.

[m2c]

Thanks for your feedback!

- I did occasionally see some text in the upper left corner of the screen, apparently some error messages. It would be nice to be able to disable that.

If you see that again, can you take note of what it says (by taking a normal OS screenshot, printscreen on windows)? We are quite careful with scene errors, perhaps one slipped by. Also, pressing backslash will hide the ui and console.

- sometimes, when the scenes transition, I see a noticeable pause. I have a pretty beefy box, so I imagine a lot of people would be noticing the same.

This is an unfortunate necessity at the moment, although most scenes shouldn't have a pause, and those that do should have a small pause at best (less than 1/2 sec). Sol and Machina are the worst culprits. Hopefully down the road we will have a solution for this, but it is a tricky problem.

And perhaps my biggest issue of all up to this point has been that the visuals seem to be out of sync (delayed) with respect to the audio in real time

Sorry to hear that - Have you tested both running as a standalone and as a plugin to Windows Media Player / iTunes? I don't know how common that problem is, but I haven't seen any noticeable lag yet. To get the best idea of how severe the lag is, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you could do this:

edit SoundSpectrum/Aeon/Home/Library/SceneData.py, change 'testScenes = 0' to 'testScenes = 1' and restart Aeon. You should see several 'T_...' scenes - select 'T_Audio', and it will show you the actual audio data Aeon is receiving. Mine, for reference, shows no noticeable lag in WMP.

[primalfoo]

Thanks for the info. I modified SceneData.py to enable the tests. It was very helpful in debugging my setup. On my computer I see a slight delay (in standalone mode) which is almost acceptable, but on the TV there's quite a bit of delay. I had to delay the audio signal in my receiver by as much as 100-120ms to get it to look/feel right. At this point I have a workable setup and need to fine tune the delay. The only issue is that the compensation delay is not applied to my receiver's second zone, so in a multi-zone setup I hear the 120ms delay around the house.

I think a possible enhancement to standalone aeon might be to read from the "input" channels, provide a configurable audio delay setting, and write to the output channels after applying the delay. This way I could've made the audio and video to be in sync after leaving my pc, ready to be fed into my receiver.

Here's the setup that worked for me:

source: squeezebox analog signal
split audio: first signal goes to aeon running on my pc for visualization, second signal goes directly to my receiver for distribution around the house
first audio: goes to input of sound card and is mirrored to two output channels. Aeon reads the audio from the "output" channels (not sure why). Audio card buffer is set to 16 samples.
second audio: goes to receiver's analog input, delaying the signal by 120ms
video: from video card's second display directly to TV (not via receiver), in mirroring displays mode. I tried direct to TV as well as via an hdmi switch.

[ravermeister]

Hello. is one of the Visualizer from Soundspectrum compatible with Winamp's
Milkdrop Plugin www.milkdrop.co.uk (.milk files)?
cause i'm thinking to switch from Milkdrop to Aeon, but have
lots of MD Presets, which i like to keep watching.

[Rovastar]

ravermeister,

No, they are not compatible with MilkDrop.

[Wombat66]

...

- sometimes, when the scenes transition, I see a noticeable pause. I have a pretty beefy box, so I imagine a lot of people would be noticing the same.

This is an unfortunate necessity at the moment, although most scenes shouldn't have a pause, and those that do should have a small pause at best (less than 1/2 sec). Sol and Machina are the worst culprits. Hopefully down the road we will have a solution for this, but it is a tricky problem.

....

Yeah, the pauses are a bit of a show stopper for me. I do enjoy Aeon but won't display it while hosting parties. Everytime there is a transition pause it destroys the mood.

Any progress on fixing this problem?

[JayPro]

I've been toying with Sol in particular, and not necessarily because I'm trying to ratchet up the frame rate that has admittedly taken vicious hits when this config is called up.
My question is essentially "how does this react to sound?" Is it the size of the flares in direct proportion to sound level? Is it the rate/strength color pulsing in the star body itself? No matter how I adjust the pre-amp & response levels, I am left with these questions somehow unanswered.

Another visual aspect that quite frankly belongs exclusively in the background is Veins. All the other configs employ actual movement as opposed to this, which is no more than Parkening Power lite. Keep this one solely as a background element, or try to find ways to add a method of reactivity, perhaps similar to Fractal Science.

2¢