kaleidosync

A WebGL Spotify visualizer made with Vue, D3, and Three.js.

Try it out at www.kaleidosync.com!

Background

The Echo Nest represents the comprehensive algorithmic analysis of music. Having been acquired by Spotify, their analysis resources are available via the Spotify API. Each song within Spotify's library has been fully analyzed: broken up into individual beats, segments, tatums, bars, and sections. There are variables assigned to describe pitch, timbre, and more esoteric descriptors like mood and "danceability." It's even possible to derive realtime volume information, all without processing the audio stream directly.

This project is my take on using this data to produce visual experiences using the power of WebGL.

Running Locally

As of version 6.0.0 you won't be able to run this project locally in any reasonable/useful way due to how coupled it is with my (unpublished) shader authoring tools. If you absolutely must get this running on your machine, feel free to reach out to me and I'll walk you through the hurdles and what you'll need to build in order for it to be useful.

Changelog

Version 6.1

• Introduces dev mode, allowing live-editing of shaders and the creation of editable uniforms.

Version 6.0

• Complete re-write.
• Sketches have been removed from the codebase and are now stored in a database.
• New architecture connects directly with my visualizer authoring tools, enabling the publishing of new visualizers with the push of a button.
• Leverages the Spotify Web Playback SDK (when available), and falls back to legacy polling in browsers that are unsupported.

Version 5.5

• Cleanup / bug fixes.
• There are now 8 visualizers to choose from.

Version 5.4

• Reduces the complexity of adding new visualizers.
• Reverts back to the traditional polling when running the dev server.
• Surfaces a control interface for WebGL scenes.

Version 5.3

• There are now 7 visualizers to choose from.

Version 5.2

• Refactor / rate limit debugging.

Version 5.1

• There are now 6 visualizers to choose from.

Version 5.0

• Major refactor.
• There are now 5 visualizers to choose from.
• Includes an interface for rendering fragment shaders.

Version 4.0

• Project backbone has been abstracted away into its own library, spotify-viz.
• Adoped @vue/cli for the UI layer.
• There are now 4 visualizers to choose from.
• User settings now persist when revisiting the site.
• More graceful error handling and authentication flow.
• This project now fully represents what's hosted on www.kaleidosync.com, instead of the bare-bones implementation that it was before.

Version 3.0

• Complete refactor with no front end dependencies.
• Transitioned to webpack from gulp.
• Reactive data store using ES6 Proxies, semi-inspired by Vuex.
• (Hopefully) less spaghetti and more comments.

Version 2.0

• Re-implemented with requestAnimationFrame()
• Now mobile-friendly, even on older devices.
• Improved tweening.
• Adjusts itself on window resize.
• More accurate syncing with Spotify, including automatic self-correction.

Version 1.0

• Holy shit, it's working... kind of.