Music LED via USB

Hello everyone, I've been searching the interwebs and this forum for what i want to do, and haven't found anything that fits the mold.. i have found videos on youtube, but have had zero luck in finding tutorials to go along with it.

so what I wanted to do was very simply have an LED pulse and beat to the music playing from my laptop. so this all comes down to code. what i have done is fallowed this tutorial on Anthony Mattox's Blog ( sorry can't post link ) and works great the only problem is that it uses the MIC in.

so i went in search of an OUT code and found this for Processing (processing AudioOUTPUT link)

but doesn't seem to work or i didn't read what the function does correctly.

so what i want to do..

  • play music from winamp on my laptop
  • send it via USB

what i don't want to do.

  • set up an audio jack

I should also say that my sound card doesn't support "Stereo Mix" I found that out in the past when i tried to use Camtasia Studio to record speaker output.. but fraps can. so i guess this could be my problem with Processing.

so if someone could point me in the right direction i'd be greatful. my search history is about a mile long from the past two days of trying to figure this out.

if i'm over complicating things feel free to call me a dumbass. :smiley:

thanks,
Dave.

the links from the top.

Anthony Mattox
http://www.anthonymattox.com/led-audio-visualizer

Audio output
http://code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/manual-audiooutput/

I have a custom plugin for Winamp that grabs some audio power and spectrum data, and sends it out a serial port. The Arduino looks like a serial port to the PC, so this is perfect. I used it to control the large MegaBrite LED spectrum matrix seen in this video from Maker Faire:

The plugin code compiles in Visual C++ Express, so you don't even have to buy Visual Studio.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll upload it somewhere.

Thats exactly what i was trying to find. the biggest thing that i found confusing was how to get audio data and transfer it to the serial port.

i have to dig out my C and C++ books, it's been a while. ;D

but i'd like to get the code if thats ok with you.

Cheers,
Dave

Okay, finally got some time to dig through old files and find the code.

It's messy, but a start if you want to get some output from Winamp. Merely a hack on the publicly available example code for visuals, tweaked a bit to compile correctly in Visual C++ 2008 Express.

So, download and install VC++2008 from here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2008-Visual-CPP

Then get the zipped files from me here: http://www.macetech.com/wa502_sdk.zip

You'll have to dig into the vis and vis_test folders until you find the vcproj file to load into Visual Studio.

So yeah...the code sucks. It was really just a hack to get some specific things working quickly. The serial port is even hardcoded! So if you get some cool new functionality working, I'll gladly download your version!

Hope this helps.

Hey, i have taken interest in your Project SilverCG. and your plugin macegr. now i planned on making a 10 ch audio spectrum out of leds and my arduino. i have my 10 by 12 disply working with animations etc but i need a way to get sound info to the arduino.

macegr your rs232 script uses render 4 which is over complicated as i do not need multiple colours. my display i would prefer to be closer to your "mega wall" visualizer. i was wondering if you could help me in sending that data over rs232.

ill try it out myself but any help would be appreciated

Macegr, can you give a few more hints about your code and how to modify it as I dont know what is mission critical and what is not.

I tried compiling your plugin but it gave me an error saying SVIS.dll was not found. Would it be possible if you could post your plugin and instructions on how to change it? I apologize if this is a lot of work for you. I'm just trying to flash a few LEDs depending on the audio levels coming from winamp. No fancy RGB and VU Meter stuff. Any help would be extremely apperciated.

Cheers,
Sam

If I copy SVIS.dll to the winamp plug-in folders I sort of works, but only with megawall option, is Svis that you use to get the data out, using the rs232 rgb option?
That option doesn't show on the plug-in configuration when using the svis.dll in winamp v5.v572, what is/was your winamp version?
I have already download the winamp sdk, but only the 5.04sdk as the vis modules, and the newer 5.55 don't have then, do you anything about this?
Can you help a little further about this plug-in that you made?

Is there any updates on SamMonga post about the file not working? I am having the same issue.

cerius I got the plugin to work thanks to SilverCG. I'm attaching my SVIS.dll.

http://cid-f9a1e95d5d9f3bf6.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SVIS.dll

However I'm currently facing a new problem. I recently bought an Arduino UNO which uses a different COM port than my duemilanove so I must edit the SVIS.dll. I'm not sure how I can make this work again. Any help would be appreciated.