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‘Virtual’ V.U. Meters for MacBook…?

moomaloo

moomaloo

pfm Member
I know this is an odd one… It’s certainly a pointless one. But here goes:

I often like to sit with my (old) MacBook open between my speakers and let Discogs randomly choose which record to play next from the ‘my collection’ feature on their site. -It helps with prevarication issues and also stops me reaching for the same old things.

It occurs to me that it would be a fun visual aesthetic to have a virtual pair of analogue V.U. meters running as a full screen display as a ‘visualiser’ so that they move in reaction to the sounds picked up by the built-in microphone in the MacBook.

Am I dreaming or does anyone know of an app or other piece of software that might achieve this…?
 
I think most of the virtual DJ software packages have VU meters, but not sure if I've seen an analogue one
 
There are some really nice analog VU meter plug-ins available, however, most are intended for use with recording software apps and/or other plugins that work with such apps.

I can visualize parallel running the output of your Mac's sound device over to such as Audacity and then on to something like mvMeter2 from TBProAudio using Rogue Amoeba's 'Loopback' tool. Should this work, it would be like leaving ones old analog recording deck in record/pause whilst playing other sources. Perhaps it doesn't have to be this complicated.


mvmeter2_bign.png
 
mvMeter^2 really is a cool plug-in, however, only those running a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) setup are likely to get much use out of this.

I did manage to get the meters working with Audacity, and also managed to route system audio into Audacity via the free Soundflower MIDI plug-in (what Rogue Amoeba used to offer for rerouting system audio before they came up with Loopback).

Note to Mac users, there are two versions available, one for GPU equipped Macs, the other for none-GPU models (like my mini 2010 here). Meter action is a somewhat less than smooth sans dedicated GPU but, boy, do these meters look real on screen! Comes with five different meter themes too...

mvMeter2_themes.png
 
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Have these on my Pi Screen. Good fun and kind of cool. I just need to move up the Yammy ladder to get some real ones!
 
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