Luz

Luz is a music visualizer for VJs and creative couch potatoes.

Luz produces beautiful, moving 2D vector graphics environments, where objects react and dance to music in any way imaginable.

Luz performances can be as automated as you like, letting smart “Director” scripts choose how and when objects are displayed, or you can participate using MIDI / computer keyboards and other input devices.

Luz is Free Software and costs $0.

USER FEATURES

• Design new objects and keep an eye on what the audience is seeing in the fullscreen VJ Console.
• Send the final output video to a projector, TV, or second monitor. For more humble setups, run fullscreen on your single monitor and do without the VJ Console.
• All objects, behavior, directors, etc. are plugins, meaning you can easily download and use new ones, or even develop your own.
• Luz takes great effort to be stable. Misbehaving plugins won’t stop the show. Instead, Luz will notice that they’re broken and stop using them.
• Luz makes heavy use of tags, letting the VJ steer the show using descriptive words like “rain” or “happy”.

PLUGIN DEVELOPER FEATURES

• Plugins are written in Ruby, a popular and easy to learn programming language.
• Plugins can be added and reloaded while Luz is running, making development quick and easy.
• Luz guards itself from misbehaving plugins. If a plugin breaks (in geek-speak: causes an Exception), you can fix it, reload it live, and keep going.

HOW TO GET IT

Luz is in rapid development.  For now, the best way to get Luz is from Bazaar:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ian-mcintosh/luz/trunk

DEPENDENCIES

Luz requires Ruby and Ruby bindings for GTK+, Glade, Cairo, and OpenGL.

Ubuntu users can get everything they need with:

sudo apt-get install ruby libgtk2-ruby libglade2-ruby libgtkglext1-ruby libcairo-ruby