Free music visualizer

Why make a music visualizer video

Spotify and Apple Music take audio. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook want a video. A music visualizer, or audio visualizer maker, turns your song into a video with movement, so it can go anywhere video goes: a YouTube upload that can be found in search, a Reel that stops the scroll, a Short, a post on release day. You do not need footage, a camera or an editor, only the song and a cover.

The four looks

Bars is the classic spectrum visualizer: up to 64 bars on a log scale across the picture, each with a peak cap and a soft reflection. Circle puts your cover in the middle of a ring of 96 bars that grows with the music, and the cover swells with the bass. Wave draws the waveform as a glowing line, a classic waveform video, that always fills the space however quiet the song is. Waterfall scrolls a spectrogram through a rounded panel, a good fit for electronic music and sound design.

Every look uses a colour pair from OBRA's palette: pink and purple, orange and red, yellow and green, green and cyan, cyan and blue, indigo and purple, or steel. The pair colours the bars, the line, the ring and the background.

Pick the right shape: 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1

16:9 at 1920 by 1080 is the shape of YouTube and of most players. 9:16 at 1080 by 1920 is for Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. In that shape we keep the title, the cover and the visual in the upper and middle parts, so the captions and buttons these apps place at the bottom do not cover them. 1:1 at 1080 by 1080 suits the Instagram feed and Facebook.

Cover art, title and colours

Use the square image you use for your release. It shows as a rounded square beside the title, or inside the circle, and it is blurred into the background, so the video takes its mood from your art. Without a cover the video uses the colour pair you pick. A long title wraps to two lines and shrinks to fit. The artist name sits under it in small capitals.

How the video is made in your browser

Everything happens on your device. The page reads your song, measures the spectrum for every frame with a 4096-point transform, draws the frame on a canvas and hands it to the video encoder of your browser. The audio goes through the AAC encoder. Both are packed into an MP4 file by mp4-muxer, an open-source library under the MIT licence, and the work runs in a background worker so the page stays responsive.

Nothing waits for the song to play in real time, so on a computer a video usually takes less time than the song lasts. How much less depends on your machine. The file is 30 frames per second with H.264 video and AAC audio at about 192 kbps, and it is laid out for streaming, so it starts playing before it has fully downloaded. This needs a browser that has the video encoders: recent Chrome and Edge do. If yours does not, the preview still works and the page tells you.

Tips for a video that looks good

Master the song first. YouTube turns loud songs down to about −14 LUFS, so check yours with the LUFS meter and fix the true peak before you render.

Keep the title short. Short names read well from a phone, and the artist name in capitals gives the picture a clear second line.

Choose by genre and mood. Bars suit almost everything, circle shows off a strong cover, wave suits acoustic songs and voice, and waterfall suits electronic music and bass.

For Reels and TikTok, render the 9:16 shape and check the length limit of the app before you upload a long song.

What it does not do yet

This is a Beta. It makes one visualizer from one song, with the looks above. It does not add lyrics, video clips or a custom background yet, and songs longer than 8 minutes are not accepted. The file is built in memory, so a long video on a phone may fail. Use a computer for those.

Free and private

It is a free audio visualizer online that needs no account and uploads nothing. By default a small obra.art/tools credit sits in a corner of the video, and one switch removes it. The video is yours: we claim no rights over your music or your file.