iPod and iTunes Hacks

Extend Your Visualizer Options

Get the most out of Apple’s built-in visualizer, and get to know some cool third-party visualizer plug-ins.

You might not have discovered it yet, but there is a pretty cool visualizer—an engine for generating interesting patterns based on the pitch and rhythm of the currently playing track—built into iTunes. To see the visualizer do its thing, play a track and go to Visualizer → Turn Visualizer On. iTunes translates your music into some pretty psychedelic graphics. Go back to the Visualizer menu and select Full Screen, and the effect will fill your screen. The visualizer looks great from across the room on your computer or, even better, connected to your television. If you’re having a party, you can even try connecting your laptop to a digital projector and projecting the visuals on a wall.

Apple has built in some pretty extensive customization options for the iTunes visualizer and has done a good job of hiding them. Try all these keyboard shortcuts on both the Macintosh and Windows versions of iTunes. To access these options, have a song playing in iTunes and Apple’s visualizer turned on. Surprisingly, for Apple, the customization controls are not the most intuitive. There are three variables that control how the visualizer ends up looking: behavior, color, and color theme. The behavior variables have odd names like Uber Disco Lights, Kaleidoscope, ...