vis_avs - Advanced Visualization Studio

Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp's creator, Justin Frankel, among others. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. — Wikipedia

Modern Toolchain Port

This fork is a MingW-w64 GCC 9+ as well as MSVC 19+ port of AVS.

The goal was to create a v2.81d-compliant vis_avs.dll version that can be built with a modern toolchain, which was largely successful. One notable exception being that APEs (AVS Plugin Effects) cannot be loaded — so many effects are integrated as builtin effects instead.

Current Status

• 🪓 Split into a new libavs and the Winamp plugin frontend. Check out the APIs in the libavs header files.
• 🎉 Builds for Windows both with MSVC & MinGW-w64 GCC into a running vis_avs.dll, loadable with Winamp, as well as libavs.dll.
• 🐧 Builds for Linux as libavs.so, with pipewire audio input. EEL functions don't work yet, but basic EEL code does. A (very) basic cli frontend and a more interesting WIP Rust frontend are also available, both for rendering only, not editing.
• 💾 New JSON file format, which is more accessible for direct editing and inspection. The old binary format is still fully supported.
• 💃 Runs most presets (unless they use rare APEs).
• ❤️ Sources of original effects integrated as builtin-APEs, thanks to donations to free software by their authors:
  • ConvolutionFilter, by Tom Holden. Original here.
  • TexerII, by Steven Wittens. Original committed to this repo here.
  • AVSTrans, by TomyLobo. Original here. Refactored for this repo.
  • PictureII, by Steven Wittens.
• 🎂 Former plugin effects rewritten from scratch as builtin-APEs:
  • Normalise, originally by TomyLobo, here.
  • Colormap, originally by Steven Wittens.
  • AddBorders, originally by Goebish.
  • Triangle, originally by TomyLobo.
  • GlobalVariables, originally by Semi Essessi.
  • MultiFilter, originally by Semi Essessi.
  • FramerateLimiter, originally by Goebish.
  • Texer, originally by Steven Wittens.
• 🥵 Performance is generally the same as the official build, but can be a bit slower for some effects. A few effects have gained faster SSE3-enabled versions.

The Future

• 🧮 64-bit support
• 📟 Standalone port
• ✅ Automated output testing

These are near-future goals, and most are tracked on the issues board. For further development of AVS itself there are many ideas for improvement and known bugs. Have a look at wishlist.txt for a list of issues and feature-requests, both old and new.

Cross-Compiling & Running on Linux & Wine

Build

First, install a 32bit MingW-w64 GCC (with C++ support) and and a cross-compiler CMake.

If you want Video support through FFmpeg, you'll need to install 32bit FFmpeg packages too. This is highly variable depending on your distro, and not described below.

Choose your Linux distro, and run the respective commands to install the build dependencies and cross-compile AVS:

Archlinux / Manjaro

sudo pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-gcc mingw-w64-cmake
mkdir -p build
cd build
i686-w64-mingw32-cmake ..
make

Fedora / RedHat

sudo dnf install mingw32-gcc-c++ mingw32-gcc
mkdir -p build
cd build
mingw32-cmake ..
make

Debian / Ubuntu (& other distros)

sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64 g++-mingw-w64 cmake
mkdir -p build
cd build

# Debian- and Ubuntu-based distros don't provide ready-made cross-compiling CMake
# packages, so you'll have to tell CMake about your toolchain.
cmake -D CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../CMake-MingWcross-toolchain.txt ..

make

Run With Winamp

Once you've compiled vis_avs.dll, copy it (and some stdlib DLLs that got introduced by MinGW) to the Winamp/Plugins folder and run it with Wine:

cp vis_avs.dll /my/path/to/Winamp/Plugins/

# Not all of these might exist on your system, that's okay, you can ignore errors for
# some of the files.
# You only need to copy these files once in a while, they don't change that often.
cp \
  /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/bin/lib{gcc_s_dw2-1,ssp-0,stdc++-6,winpthread-1}.dll \
  /my/path/to/Winamp/

# If you built with FFmpeg support, you'll need to copy the FFmpeg DLLs too. If you
# don't, AVS will still work, but again without video support.

# Run Winamp
wine /my/path/to/Winamp/winamp.exe

Building & Running Linux native

There's two slightly different test programs for Linux support. One in C, one in Rust. Both are built automatically with the current CMake setup.

Prepare & build first:

# Install Rust 32bit linux toolchain
rustup target add i686-unknown-linux-gnu

# Compile
cmake -B build_linux --toolchain CMake-Linux32cross-toolchain.txt
cmake --build build_linux --parallel $(nproc)

Then run either the C version:

build_linux/avs-cli
# prints a static image to the terminal,

or the Rust version:

RUSTFLAGS="-L build_linux" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=build_linux build_linux/avs /path/to/some/preset.avs
# opens a window if given a preset file as first parameter.

On Linux the Rust program also opens an audio input device, if the system uses Pipewire.

Building & Running on Windows

Build

Open the folder with Visual Studio, it should automatically detect the CMake configurations.

If you don't want to do this, there are some caveats to using CMake itself directly:

• Use -DCMAKE_GENERATOR_PLATFORM=Win32 to get a 32-bit project. Nothing builds under 64-bit with the MS compiler due to __asm blocks (yet).
• CMake doesn't rebuild the project very well if you don't clean out the generated files first. Visual Studio handles this for you.
• Using the CMake GUI is not recommended.

Run With Winamp

If you properly installed Winamp2 with the installer the project import should pickup the installation location for you and will copy the output vis_avs.dll into the Winamp/Plugins directory for you. You can then:

• Start Winamp
• Debug > Attach to process (Ctrl+Alt+P), search for "winamp"
• Launch AVS by double-clicking the small oscilloscope/spectrum vis on the left of Winamp's main window

Conventions

If going through the code reveals areas of possible improvements, mark them with a TODO comment, possibly using a secondary flag to categorize the suggestion:

tag	intent
// TODO [cleanup]: <comment>	cleaner or more readable code is possible here
// TODO [bugfix]: <comment>	more stable or less buggy code is possible here
// TODO [performance]: <comment>	the performance of AVS could be better here
// TODO [feature]: <comment>	a new capability of AVS could be implemented here

Notes

Thanks to Warrior of the Light for assembling the source from various edits and patch versions that floated around soon after the code publication.

Thanks to Jan for maintaining Visbot & invaluable feedback and brainstorming over the years.

Thanks to Sebastian for many hours of eartime and code minutiae discussions and the CI script.

Thanks to Lukas for some code help, but mostly ideas and feedback.

License

BSD-3, see LICENSE.TXT.