eXo Visualiser is an iTunes plugin that creates synced visual animations to the music.
One of the standout features of the exo music visualization engine is its fully hardware-accelerated 2D procedural texture generation unit and 3D scene description. This allows you to mix and match both approaches in the same environment. Currently, it runs on Mac OS X and uses OpenGL for the acceleration, while PBuffer is utilized for creating procedural textures.
eXo is loaded with nice things, including using XML to load descriptions, making it highly flexible. It also boasts of a mathematical parser that evaluates expressions for all behaviors such as particles, colors, and waveform. Additionally, it has a full modular 3D shape synthesizer, which is really fun to explore. With a preset system, you can easily store effect descriptions and reload them with just a simple statement.
The only limitations to the number of 2D or 3D layers are constrained by the GPU and the available texture memory. The software also has both global and local variables, with global variables supplied with time and beat information, and as much local variables allowed as possible, allocated dynamically when expressions are read from the description.
The 2D effects in eXo include the classical dissolutions, rotozoom, fade, all hardware accelerated through PBuffer. Most of the effects allocate a PBuffer to render their content and mix it to the final texture. Additionally, expressions may be attached to a variety of events, such as on beat, on init, and on render element, making the software very flexible. The current implementation does not utilize many OpenGL extensions, making it run across a broad range of hardware.
Building the 3D scene is impressive, and any number of layers can easily be stacked with the textures rendered just as a quad or passed through intricate shapes like blobs, tunnels, etc. Thus, to run eXo, you need a PowerPC G3 500MHz or better, iTunes 2.0 or later, and a Hardware Accelerated OpenGL Graphics Card (ATI Rage Pro or higher).
Version 1.2.4: N/A