Milkdrop as Screensaver

[|3enjam]

I read in another post about how MilkDrop is for Winamp only, and I kind of see your point about compatibility and the pain of weeding out bugs for little known players, but what about a screen saver. Just a little screen saver app that finds milkdrop in the winamp folder and runs it. I know there would be no sounds or beats but maybe the app could inject some white or pink noise into the vis, just to get it moving, besides, many of the presets I've seen have very little sound reactivity anyway (although the images ARE amazing). The point is, I've never seen any screen saver make anywhere near the fractalicious images that come out of MilkDrop.

Just a thought, no flames needed.

[redi jedi]

humm, i hadent ever though of an outside application using the milkdrop dll file, and emulating the winamp functions... although that is a little deep for me, i'm sorry to say. but it is posible! i might figure out how to do it one day, but not today..

[JSMain]

OtsDj has been using milkdrop for quite some time. It's what I use with milkdrop.

It would be cool as a screensaver app however.

[Rovastar]

I don't know if this is needed.

If you didn't know there is a plugin for winamp that makes you visualization be the screensaver.

Dr0 mod and dev for winamp has done thsi:

http://nunzioweb.com/daz/autofs.html

There are a few more too like:
http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=34264
And ben marsh who wrote the trpiex vis did one too but I cannot find that atm.

[|3enjam]

The only trouble with those, is that you need to have winamp already running. Even if it could work without Winamp, some of the presets need sound to even move, so the app would have to pump some kind of white or pink noise (which is NOT sent to the speakers, so you don't get a nasty hiss when your screen saver comes on) into the dll to get the presets to move the way the author intended.

Another feature that would be nice, is when milkdrop is activated by the SS app, milkdrop only reads from a special 'ScreenSaver' directory where several 'non-musical' (and the like) presets have been added. So it doesn't try to display any presets that are very sound reactive and therefore not that cool to look at without sound.

But I'm still just dreaming, if this does happen, it's a long way off. But it would be cool.

[|3enjam]

Where would be a good place to request something like this?
Who would be willing to do it?

[Phat]

Well, if it HAS to respond to music, there could always be the option of keeping a SUPER low bitrate MP3 in an application file. (And I mean like 5 kbps mono short looping cip.)

I have no idea who would program Milkdrop to do that, but it doesn't sound like a bad idea for a viz app.

[Sire404]

Bump! This should really not be that difficult, and it would be the coolest screensaver ever. Is really no one willing to flex their C++ skills? :eek:

[Phat]

Don't expect others to do it for you. How about you flex you're skills?

[Sire404]

I'm a good .NET programmer but I know my limitations.

[Gav-B]

I have -0 programming skills. If I had any though this would go top of my "Life ToDo" list.

Let me put it simply...

Screen savers are RUBBISH!

Always have been & always will be, *unless* you can get MilkDrop's hypnotic loveliness working as an independent screen saver.

That would really turn heads in the office, and not bug me at home.

[w-sky]

Screensavers are not rubbish, otherwise you wouldn't want to have MilkDrop as one. ;)

But Milkdrop makes no sense if Winamp is not playing music, because it reacts to the music and that is what makes it so hypnotic!

If you want to have a nice selection a visually stunning screensavers for Windows, search for the "Really Slick Screensavers" (RSSv0.1). They are ported versions of free Linux OpenGL screensavers and they are awesome. If the graphics card supports OpenGL well, they can have very little CPU impact. Two things are rubbish: A screensaver that causes 100% CPU usage (because that will turn up energy comsumption and heat), and a very bright screensaver on a CRT monitor (e.g. text or graphics on white/light background) for mainly the same reasons.

PS: I found the WPSS Winamp Plugin Screen-Saver to be working much better than the one from the winamp.com plugins archive. See this thread. (http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=184794)

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