vis_avs - Advanced Visualization Studio

Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp's creator, Justin Frankel, among others. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. — Wikipedia

Modern Toolchain Port

This fork is a MingW-w64 GCC 8+ as well as MSVC 19+ port of AVS.

The goal was to create a v2.81d-compliant vis_avs.dll version that can be built with a modern toolchain, which was largely successful. One notable exception being that APEs (AVS Plugin Effects) cannot be loaded — so many effects are integrated as builtin effects instead.

Current Status

🎉 Builds with MinGW-w64 GCC into a running vis_avs.dll, loadable with Winamp.
💃 Runs most presets (unless they use rare APEs).
❤️ Sources of original effects integrated as builtin-APEs, thanks to donations to free software by their authors:
- ConvolutionFilter, by Tom Holden. Original here.
- TexerII, by Steven Wittens. Original committed to this repo here.
- AVSTrans, by TomyLobo. Original here. Refactored for this repo.
- PictureII, by Steven Wittens.
🎂 Former plugin effects rewritten from scratch as builtin-APEs:
- Normalise, originally by TomyLobo, here.
- Colormap, originally by Steven Wittens.
- AddBorders, originally by Goebish.
- Triangle, originally by TomyLobo.
- GlobalVariables, originally by Semi Essessi.
- MultiFilter, originally by Semi Essessi.
- FramerateLimiter, originally by Goebish.
- Texer, originally by Steven Wittens.
🥵 Performance is generally the same as the official build, but can be a bit slower for some effects. A few effects have gained faster SSE3-enabled versions.
🧨 APE files are crashing AVS or preventing it from starting. Rename or remove .ape files for now.

The Future

🪓 Separate Windows UI code from the renderer
📟 Standalone port (probably SDL2-based)
🐧 Linux port
✅ Automated output testing
💾 JSON file format support

These are near-future goals, and most are tracked on the issues board. For further development of AVS itself there are many ideas for improvement and known bugs. Have a look at wishlist.txt for a list of issues and feature-requests, both old and new.

Building & Running on Linux

Build

First, install a 32bit MingW-w64 GCC (with C++ support) and and a cross-compiler CMake.

Choose your Linux distro, and run the respective commands to install the build dependencies and cross-compile AVS:

Archlinux / Manjaro

sudo pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-gcc mingw-w64-cmake
mkdir -p build
cd build
i686-w64-mingw32-cmake ..
make

Fedora / RedHat

sudo dnf install mingw32-gcc-c++ mingw32-gcc
mkdir -p build
cd build
mingw32-cmake ..
make

Debian / Ubuntu (& other distros)

sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64 g++-mingw-w64 cmake
mkdir -p build
cd build

# Debian- and Ubuntu-based distros don't provide ready-made cross-compiling CMake
# packages, so you'll have to tell CMake about your toolchain.
cmake -D CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../CMake-MingWcross-toolchain.txt ..

make

Run With Winamp

Once you've compiled vis_avs.dll, copy it (and some stdlib DLLs that got introduced by MinGW) to the Winamp/Plugins folder and run it with Wine:

cp vis_avs.dll /my/path/to/Winamp/Plugins/

# Not all of these might exist on your system, that's okay, you can ignore errors for
# some of the files.
# You only need to copy these files once, they don't change.
cp /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/bin/lib{gcc_s_dw2-1,ssp-0,stdc++-6,winpthread-1}.dll /my/path/to/Winamp/

# Run Winamp
wine /my/path/to/Winamp/winamp.exe

Building & Running on Windows

Build

Open the folder with Visual Studio, it should automatically detect the CMake configurations.

If you don't want to do this, there are some caveats to using CMake itself directly:

Use -DCMAKE_GENERATOR_PLATFORM=Win32 to get a 32-bit project. Nothing builds under 64-bit with the MS compiler due to __asm blocks (yet).
CMake doesn't rebuild the project very well if you don't clean out the generated files first. Visual Studio handles this for you.
Using the CMake GUI is not recommended.

Run With Winamp

If you properly installed Winamp2 with the installer the project import should pickup the installation location for you and will copy the output vis_avs.dll into the Winamp/Plugins directory for you. You can then:

Start Winamp
Debug > Attach to process (Ctrl+Alt+P), search for "winamp"
Launch AVS by double-clicking the small oscilloscope/spectrum vis on the left of Winamp's main window

Conventions

If going through the code reveals areas of possible improvements, mark them with a TODO comment, possibly using a secondary flag to categorize the suggestion:

tag	intent
`// TODO [cleanup]: <comment>`	cleaner or more readable code is possible here
`// TODO [bugfix]: <comment>`	more stable or less buggy code is possible here
`// TODO [performance]: <comment>`	the performance of AVS could be better here
`// TODO [feature]: <comment>`	a new capability of AVS could be implemented here

Notes

Thanks to Warrior of the Light for assembling the source from various edits and patch versions that floated around soon after the code publication.

License

BSD-3, see LICENSE.TXT.

Customizable, environment-aware shortcuts

A future version of AVS should have more customizable global shortcuts and, more importantly, they should be documented somewhere in the UI. The following were hidden in the changelog of an alpha version of Winamp 2.0:

Hotkeys for main window:

Any winamp key

R toggles randomswitching

F toggles fullscreen framerate counter

Y and U cycle through presets in order

Space goes to random preset

Enter toggles fullscreen

0,1-9, F1-F10 load presets

Ctrl+above save presets

Some of these defaults are not ideal since they have been chosen with QWERTY keyboards and (obviously) the Windows operating system in mind. If future versions also support other operating systems, these defaults should become environment-aware.

Environment awareness should not only take the operating system into account but also keyboard layout (maybe other localization preferences, that I can't think of at this point).

Here are two examples:

Operating system defaults

macOS already has a shortcut to toggle an application into fullscreen, so intuitively a user would want to use that rather than an application-specific shortcut. However, this special case also bears the potential for conflict. Since shortcuts should be customizable by the user, a global shortcut should not be overridable – a custom shortcut can only be an addition to the OS default.

Another oddity is the shortcut to save presets, which I haven't even been aware of. It's beyond me why one would not use the system default (e.g. Ctrl+S?)

Keyboard layout

The shortcuts to change to the next or previous preset is somewhat problematic on non-QWERTY layouts. The defaults Y (previous) and U (next) have clearly been chosen because in a QWERTY layout, they sit next to each other. Personally, I don't find this choice very intuitive. Other shortcuts such as toggling random switching (R), and toggle FPS counter (F) are easy to remember for their mnemonics (for English speakers anyway). IMHO it would be far more intuitive to use the cursor keys to switch presets, possibly ”protected” by a modifier key.

PS: Media-keys are no option, since they are used by Winamp itself.

Lastly, such information should be documented in the interface. Ideally in a dedicated view, but also equivalent menus. For example, the context-menu has a "fullscreen" entry, but doesn't hint at the available shortcut.

PS: I'm aware, that some of these issues don't affect the future version of AVS itself, but its individual frontends outside of Winamp.

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vis_avs's Introduction

vis_avs - Advanced Visualization Studio

Modern Toolchain Port

Current Status

The Future

Building & Running on Linux

Build

Run With Winamp

Building & Running on Windows

Build

Run With Winamp

Conventions

Notes

License

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