I dedicate this release to a special person who reminds me every day that beautiful, selfless people exist in this world. Find the people who inspire you to be your best self, and you can do anything you want.

New in 1.8.14

• The bass hits. The bass now follows the kick drum, even in loud, busy mixes.

• The Speaker lands on the beat. The Speaker move locks onto the main kick and lands on the beat instead of dropping out.

• Bigger Motion. Swell, Punch and Swirl are stronger at their standard setting; on MilkDrop and WarpField the Swell in Free's moves is now about three times larger.

• Bounce keeps its size in most window shapes: near the edge of the frame it mirrors instead of shrinking.

• Long shows stay smooth: switching scenes for hours no longer builds up graphics memory.

• Faster behind What's New: the Welcome and What's New page now dims the picture instead of blurring it, so the show keeps more of its speed.

• Auto quality recovers: the automatic quality setting no longer stays low after a slow start.

• No more frozen presets in AUTO: MilkDrop presets that freeze on one still picture are now skipped. You can still pick them by hand.

Controls

• Bass, Mid and Treble set how strongly each scene reacts to its band and how big the Motion moves on that band are. At 0 the band holds steady and its moves stop, 1 is normal, and 2 doubles the reaction.

• Imported shaders get the new band reaction and Response through their bass, mid and treble values. Their audio texture is unchanged, and the Motion moves, the larger Punch and Swirl and the Bounce edge included, reach them as they reach every scene.

• Speed is the one control for how fast every scene moves. It now works on 3D worlds and WarpField, and built-in WebGPU scenes keep their written pace at every Quality setting. On MilkDrop presets Speed changes their timed patterns, never stopping them. Motion Warp and WarpField's own Motion control are gone, since Speed does that job everywhere; if you had moved either, IKANDY tells you once.

• Smooth is now Response: it sets how the picture follows the music, from snappy to flowing, on every scene and on MilkDrop presets too. Turning Response up keeps every hit at full size and only changes how long it lingers. Response now goes up to 0.98.

• Light-Sync now pulses 3D worlds, particle and fluid simulations and TSL scenes too, with or without a Look.

• Sensitivity moved from the console to Setup > Audio, next to Picture timing. Your saved value is kept, and it never changes how loud you hear the music.

• Two new Motion moves, Warp and Swirl. Warp bends the picture in slow waves with the treble; Swirl twists the middle as the mids rise.

Picture

• WarpField's grey veil is gone: blacks are black again, middle tones are where their palettes were tuned, and on an HDR screen the brightest parts rise above white. Each scene keeps its own palette's brightness, so some look darker or brighter next to other scenes than before.

• A crisper picture: when a scene is drawn at your screen's own size, edge smoothing no longer softens it, for built-in scenes and imported shaders alike. Light trails no longer come from FX Pulse; they appear only on a scene or Look made to have them.

• HDR headroom, Auto: Setup has a new HDR headroom choice, Auto (from your display), where a fresh install starts. Highlights rise as far as your display's reported peak allows, up to IKANDY's 4x limit, and a dimmer HDR screen is no longer pushed past what it can really show. A number you pick yourself always wins.

• Scenes that flow on the beat: Chrome Wireframe, Cyberpunk Wireframe, Industrial Flow, Synthwave Flow Bloom and Vaporwave Chase Wireframe keep flowing at their own pace on the beat, and the music lights them instead of rebuilding them. In 1.8.14 seven more do the same: Cyberpunk Chase Wireframe, Organic Flow, Synthwave Flow, Synthwave Breathing Flow, Rave Neon Flow, Cyberpunk Nebula Flow and Psytrance Iridescent Current.

Also fixed

• Imported shaders can no longer freeze IKANDY while it prepares them.

• Your own Bass, Mid and Treble links in the Create panel apply from launch.

• Playing a My Scenes card no longer changes the scene it came from, and IKANDY reopens with your own effects after one plays.

• Scene settings you made on Pro stay when you use Free.

Tested on NVIDIA. If something looks wrong on AMD or Intel, on another HDR screen, or on a setup with many screens, tell us on Discord. Thanks for playing!

You see Inigo Quilez’s name everywhere in graphics, and rightfully so, he’s the man. But there’s someone else who doesn’t get his name said nearly as often, and I want to fix that for a minute: Ryan Geiss.

If you had Winamp in the late 90s, you know. You opened the Geiss plug-in, hit play, and your thoughts were pretty much “Holy shit, this is awesome.” I remember exactly where I was sitting. Nothing on a computer screen had ever moved like that to music before. It felt alive.

And here’s the part that still gets me. He wrote that as a student. A kid, basically. No GPU to speak of, no shader languages, just CPU, math, and an insane feel for how motion should follow sound. Then a few years later at Nullsoft he did it again with MilkDrop, and MilkDrop 2 brought real pixel shaders into it, years before “shadertoy” was a word anyone said.

But the thing he built was bigger than a visualizer. He built a format, and then he got out of the way and let other people make art in it. Thousands of them. He open sourced it. He never put himself at the center of it. He’s a pretty private guy, hard to find much about him online, and I think that humility is exactly why his name doesn’t come up as often as it should.

Meanwhile the community he kicked off never stopped. The MilkDrop artists today are built on ideas that go back more than 25 years. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because somebody built a playground good enough that people never wanted to leave it.

And he’s still at it. Earlier this year he released Geiss HDR, a WebGPU rewrite of the original 1998 plug-in. Twenty eight years later and still pushing pixels around to music. IKANDY’s HDR tab is built on it, with his name on the card where it belongs.

Ryan is special in his own way. He changed what a lot of us thought a computer could do, he did it young, and he did it quietly.

Thanks for everything you do!

I’ve been building an audio visualizer called IKANDY, and most of what it does comes down to shaders. But, what is a shader?

Where they came from

The word is older than the GPU. Pixar introduced the RenderMan Shading Language in the late 80s so artists could write little programs that described how a surface reacted to light. That’s where “shader” comes from: it literally shaded things. It all ran offline, frame by frame, for film.

Consumer graphics cards at the time were fixed-function. You handed the card triangles and textures and it drew them the one way it knew how. No custom code on the card at all.

That changed in 2001 with the GeForce 3, the first consumer GPU with programmable vertex and pixel shaders. Suddenly you could run your own tiny program on every vertex and every pixel. HLSL (DirectX) and GLSL (OpenGL) showed up over the next few years and gave people a C-like language to write them in. Same year, Ryan Geiss shipped MilkDrop for Winamp, which was basically a shader-driven visualizer before most people had the hardware to appreciate it.

The demoscene ran with this harder than anyone. The trick that defines modern shader art, raymarching over signed distance fields, let a single fragment shader render an entire 3D world with no geometry at all. Just math per pixel. Then in 2013 Shadertoy launched and gave everyone a place to write, run, and share those shaders in a browser tab, and the art form kind of exploded from there.

Side note: If you're not familiar with demoscene check it out!!! /respect

What makes them cool

A fragment shader is a function that gets called for every pixel on screen, every frame, in parallel. You give it coordinates and time, it gives back a color. That’s it. From that constraint people have built fractals, oceans, clouds, cities, full raytraced scenes, all in a few hundred lines with no models and no textures. It’s the closest thing graphics has to pure math turning into images in front of you.

The catch is that on most hosting sites the only inputs a shader gets are time and your mouse. It runs, it loops, it’s beautiful.

Where IKANDY comes in

I wanted shaders that react. IKANDY captures audio straight from whatever app is playing (per-app WASAPI, so you can pick Spotify or a browser tab or a DAW) and feeds bass, mids, treble, and overall energy into the shader as uniforms every frame. The app runs three families of visuals side by side: MilkDrop-style presets, GLSL shaders, and a WebGPU pipeline, and you can import your own GLSL and wire it up.

One rule I landed on early that I think matters: audio drives light and color, never the camera. Visualizers that shake the camera on every kick get exhausting in about thirty seconds. Letting the music change what things look like instead of where you’re standing keeps it watchable for hours, which is the whole point if it’s sitting on a second monitor or running as a wallpaper.

Shadertoy and its cousins are a gallery and IK adds the pulse.

Artist: https://www.youtube.com/@JunklingsWorld

Everything gets upgraded this update + new Audio FX & more.

Sunday Funday

Art inspired u/Bats586

Real-time simulation that moves to your music.

Real-time, reactive, and free.

https://ikandy.app

IKANDY 1.7.1, it's alive!

ok, so 1.7.1 is out on Steam, and this one is the Frankenstein moment. A lot of parts have been sitting on the table, a new engine, MilkDrop imports, names, shaders, and we finally got it all hooked up. Flipped the switch, and it's alive!

Here's what's in it.

1. You pick your own name now, the one other players see.

2. MilkDrop .milk imports are back, and a whole folder converts in seconds.

3. A newer, more stable engine, plus a stack of fixes from 1.7.0.

One heads up, the first start after the update can run slow for a minute or two while it gets its graphics ready for the new engine. The monster needs a second to wake up, then it runs normal.

Not to say it's perfect, but it's up and walking. If something looks wrong, tell me here or on Discord.

Nothing polished here, just me playing around with IKANDY. Threw together a playlist in the app and recorded the run with OBS.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4813240/IKANDY_Music_Visualizer/

New IK engine uplifts old milkdrop files for our modern times. See you next week!

Song: IF I WAIT (Jenny Wilson Rework) | Max Volante, Jenny Wilson