No matter how good your music is, it can always be more attention-grabbing when combined with some great visuals. This is why music videos continue to be popular and most bands make use of visualizers when playing live shows. Of course, using visualizers is not a new concept, and as far back as the mid-seventies was marketing their Atari Video Music. The AVM was an electronic music visualizer and while it wasn't that successful, it did pave the way for other innovators. These days there are plenty of options available if you want to add some video content to the music that you are sharing online. Social media posts in particular perform a lot better with videos instead of just pure audio. If you are looking to draw more attention to your music, but don't want to spend a fortune on music videos, here are some great visualizers for your synth tracks.

Magic Music Visuals

Website

Price: $44.95 USD for Magic Studio / $79.95 USD for Magic Performer

Magic by Color & Music, LLC, is a desktop application with a modular interface for creating interactive animation and video effects. It works with all types of live audio, including MIDI and synthesizers, and even allows you to use multiple audio/MIDI/OSC inputs at the same time. The dynamic visuals can be designed from scratch and Magic has a variety of different effects to choose from. These creations can be presented in full-screen mode, which is great for live performances or exported to movie files. The latter is ideal for doing some additional editing before uploading your videos to social media. Magic is available for Windows as well as macOS/OSX and a free demo of the software can be used for trial purposes. Magic can be purchased as the "Studio" version or the "Performer" version with the latter being more expensive, but containing additional features for live performances.

Signalizer

Website

Price: Free

Signalizer by Janus Lynggaard Thorborg is an open-source and free real-time signal visualization program for VST and AU. The Alpha version of Signalizer was released back in 2016 and since then the developer has added a lot of improvements and features. Signalizer can be run in fullscreen mode or a freely resizable window and features a number of global presets. It has software and OpenGL rendering engines along with a pure vector graphics UI. Its vector scope offers a "3D view" of your waveforms, with time as the z-axis while its spectrum has spectrogram or spectral view modes. It also has an oscilloscope with waveforms that can be painted spectrally with custom colors for each band. The developer still considers Signalizer to be in alpha, so don't expect a lot of support, but considering it's free there's no reason not to give it a try.

Synesthesia

Website

Price: $99 for standard licence / $299 for pro license

Synesthesia was designed to create mind-blowing visual experiences in realtime using the power of shaders. It has more than 50 built-in scenes to get you up and running within seconds and can automatically translate music into visual action using advanced audio algorithms. Synesthesia even allows you to delve deeper and create your own scenes with a live coding environment if you have programming skills. In addition to being able to import your own videos to transform in real-time, Synesthesia also offers midi mappable controls that you can use to drive the action. The video output is generated in real-time and can be sent directly to something like a projector for live performances. A trial license, which watermarks the visual output with the Synesthesia logo, is available along with standard and pro licenses. These are all once-off purchases that do not expire and the software is available for both Windows and macOS/OSX.

Luminant Music

Website

Price: $3.99 per month / $9.99 per month for Pro

Luminant Music is a visualizer that is available for both mobile devices as well as desktops. Its microphone feature allows you to visualize any performance live or you can produce your own high-quality videos using either presets or advanced controls. Luminant Music can render 3D scenes that react to your music in real-time and the results are eye-catching, to say the least. There are more than 120 scenes to choose from in the desktop versions and 140+ scenes in the mobile versions. Free trials are available for the desktop versions, but a monthly subscription is required to make use of the software. The mobile version is free with in-app ads, which can be removed with a per-month subscription.

Conclusion

These are by no means the only visualizers that are available, so be sure to check out other software such as Resolme, Eyesy, Plane9, and Animus. Let us know in the comments or on the forum if you use any visualizers for your own work, whether it is for live performances, online videos, or purely for your own enjoyment.