Sync Music Automatically

[pat2k3]

Hey guys,

I was wondering using FPP, is there a way for me to sync music automatically to lights?

What I mean is, is there a way for me to input music through lets say Mic Input USB soundcard, and lights could follow the music beat automatically? Wether its the radio playing, MP3 Player, etc, Id like my setup to show different lights anywhere.

Thanks

[Materdaddy]

When I saw the subject title I thought you were going to ask for the data files to be synced between multiple PIs on the same network, which IS a feature that's been talked about.  What you're asking for is usually called a "color organ".  Unfortunately there is no color organ feature yet.  As far as I know it's not on any TODO lists of the developers either.  Chris might have thought about it, but I don't remember it being mentioned.

[pat2k3]

So as far as I can tell, the FPP could work, but the code isn't in place. Is there a way to code addons for FPP?

I've love to get more information about this and maybe I could code something

[tbone321]

I don't think that this should be added to FPP.  FPP is a player, not a sequencer and this is a sequencing function.  Normal "color organs" are 4 to 8 channels and these are already available.  Adding this function to a device that can work with thousands of channels would be a lot of work and increase the complexity of the interface.  If this is a desired feature and I can see where it could be at times, perhaps it could be possible addition to Nutcracker.

[JonB256]

But an "Auto-Nutcracker" feature that would create an XSEQ and FSEQ file from a music file could do what you want, then just copy it over to the Falcon Player. That way the analyzing power would be a greater than the Pi or BBB processor.

I know Color Organs usually just have 3 or 4 outputs, but surely that could be expanded and made smarter.

[Gary]

If you want a color organ-like effect that detects the beat of the music, I suppose what you can do is play the song in something like Windows Media Player (which already has a funky/psychedelic color organ/visualizer built-in), use some sort of screen capture utility to turn it into a video, and import the video into a sequencing program which supports video import in order to map to the pixels in your display.

[CaptainMurdoch]

So as far as I can tell, the FPP could work, but the code isn't in place. Is there a way to code addons for FPP?

I've love to get more information about this and maybe I could code something

I think this could be done as a plugin or external program if you are C/Perl/Python handy.  You could setup a virtual loopback device in ALSA and capture from that which should catch anything played by mpg123 and ogg123 (but not omxplayer).  Then you could have a script or program reading data from the virtual capture device and munging that data and then using the Pixel Overlay feature to write channel data which is then displayed by FPP.  This is similar to what a couple of us are playing with using webcams.  The external program captures video from a webcam and uses the Pixel Overlay feature to display the webcam image on a matrix.

Here's a link which describes the virtual loopback device setup:  https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147852   I think that should work on the Pi with a little tweaking, but haven't tested it.  The snd-aloop kernel module is included in our FPP SD build.

[pat2k3]

Thanks for the reply.

I understand some of you are saying to analyse the track first, but for this usage, they are streamed media. I won't always have the media on hand, hence why I said MP3 player, Radio, and such. Sometimes I have live mixes from DJs playing live and Id like to get the light show up and running. Some what like how music microphone works with some DMX boards.

Maybe the PI alone doesn't have enough power, Id have to try and see.

[pat2k3]

So as far as I can tell, the FPP could work, but the code isn't in place. Is there a way to code addons for FPP?

I've love to get more information about this and maybe I could code something

I think this could be done as a plugin or external program if you are C/Perl/Python handy.  You could setup a virtual loopback device in ALSA and capture from that which should catch anything played by mpg123 and ogg123 (but not omxplayer).  Then you could have a script or program reading data from the virtual capture device and munging that data and then using the Pixel Overlay feature to write channel data which is then displayed by FPP.  This is similar to what a couple of us are playing with using webcams.  The external program captures video from a webcam and uses the Pixel Overlay feature to display the webcam image on a matrix.

Here's a link which describes the virtual loopback device setup:  https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147852   I think that should work on the Pi with a little tweaking, but haven't tested it.  The snd-aloop kernel module is included in our FPP SD build.

Thanks Chris. This might be something closer to what I was thinking.