Vibralizer is the latest app to launch into early access on Steam, which leans into the world of music visualisation. I have extremely fond memories of playing music with Winamp and Windows Media Player visualisations on, whilst singing loudly as a teenager. Honestly, I’m still doing it at 42 years old, but the visualisation element of player apps has dropped away over the years. Vibralizer intends to bring them back.
The menu is based around marbles that contain vibes. Depending on the intensity and dynamic range of the music you play, each vibe will interact with your music differently. One of the development team has hearing loss, and she has been exploring ways to showcase the full range of a piece of music that goes beyond her own hearing range. That translates to a fireplace where certain flames flicker and burn higher when different frequencies are louder. It results in spectral dots that pulsate to rhythms and vibrate like the inside of a speaker. There’s a glass armonica turned sound wave that bubbles outwards when certain sounds hit its sound range. My favourite is a pair of goggly eyes in space that bounce around more chaotically as the music gets more intense. A piano scroll of lightwaves shoots towards you, like a music credits crawl in space. Others are like smeared ethereal Morse code and work better with intricate piano melodies as each note leaves a tiny mark.
Setting up Vibralizer is easy, although it’s geared more towards microphones and streaming services. It currently doesn’t pick up the information of any MP3s being played, which meant I had to reroute the audio capture to my webcam microphone to pick up my music. Whilst Vibralizer is in early access, I can imagine more integrated MP3 support will come later. I think this workaround also flattened some of the dynamics of the visualisations, as a few were quite timid for me compared to the trailers and promotional material. I’d also like to have some customisation options in the future. A few of the vibes are interactive and change colour hues are react to your mouse clicks, which are lovely touches. Being able to set up or save custom presets would be the cherry on the cake.
The foundations are here for a fun and playful visualizer for your music collection with Vibralizer. I’ll be following its development over its early access period and will update this post with an additional V1.0 release comment when it reaches it. I’m looking forward to some more zany vibes to have a private party for one. The developer has confirmed that everything I’ve fed back is being worked on, too. Yay! In a rare double-post, I’ve also featured this on another of my websites, Higher Plain Music. This has happened about 5 times in 20 years. Don’t worry, I won’t be spamming everyone who reads both! Cheers!
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
