I Finally Found a Good Retro-Style Music Visualizer App

Every once in a while a seemingly pointless computing question of mine becomes an obsession. This week, that question is, "Whatever happened to music visualizers? And can I still use one?"

In the 2000s, one of the coolest things you could do on a computer was turn on some music, enable the visualizer—a kind of psychedelic-inspired animation that would react to the music—and space out. These days, though? Well, Apple Music still has the visualizer offered by iTunes back in the day—just click Window > Visualizer in the menu bar to bring it up. But Apple is alone on this. Spotify, the most popular streaming service, doesn't have any kind of visualizer—just a full-screen view with a photo of the artist. Amazon Music and YouTube Music don't have anything, either.

You might think this is where where my research should have stopped. You're wrong. We had something amazing and we lost it. That's unacceptable. This missing feature stuck in my head to the point of obsession, prompting untold numbers of searches while I should have been working on something else.

Eventually I found the unfortunately named MilkyMilky, a free application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that brings back the famous Milkdrop visualizer that Winamp was famous for. Even better: it works with any audio on your computer, meaning any application that makes sound is supported.

To get started, download the application and launch it. The visualizer will start immediately, though there will be a pop-up explaining the keyboard shortcuts offered.

You can use the arrow keys to switch between different animations. You can also open the settings by pressing Ctrl+S. From here, you can set which audio source to use and fine tune the graphics a little bit. You can even change the audio source to your microphone, if you want; sing or play an instrument and the visualizer will react.

There's a bit of a catch for Mac users, mostly related to the permissions—macOS doesn't allow applications to monitor currently playing audio. MilkyMilky works around this by using your microphone, which isn't exactly ideal, but it works. You can work around this using an application called Loopback, which can turn your system audio into a virtual microphone. (It's up to you to decide whether that's overkill just to use Milkdrop.)

This tool works best with songs that have a really well defined rhythm or bass line, so that you can see the moment of impact on each beat. It's also ideally something a little bit trippy. I've been enjoying putting on Magdalena Bay's most recent album—it fits extremely well. If your tastes are less modern, though, you probably can't go wrong with Pink Floyd.

I've had a lot of fun leaving this on in the background during work days and I hope you enjoy it, too. Mostly I'm glad I can stop obsessively researching this.