Fische

Fische is an open source, cross-platform and freely distributed commad-line/graphical software project implemented in C/C++ and designed especially for those who are annoyed by the so-called “visualizers” plugins found in many audio playback applications.

Produces stunning 3D effects

Fische provides a standalone sound visualization utility produces stunning 3D effects and reacts to the music outputted by your music player software. It is engineered to accept and process audio data from almost anywhere (audio application, microphone, a line-in connection, etc.).

Getting started with Fische

Installing Fische is quite easy using the source package provided by the developer. All you need is the CMake and FreeGLUT packages. To install it, download the latest release from either Softoware or the project’s official website (see the homepage link at the bottom of the article) and save it on your Home directory.

Extract the archive, open a terminal emulator app, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files, run the ‘cmake .’ command to configure the program, then run the ‘make’ command to compile it, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.

Command-line options

A couple of command-line options are available for the Fische program, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘fische --help’ command after installation. These will allow you to start the app in full-screen or nervous mode, as well as to set the level of detail (be aware that this function eats a lot of CPU and your computer might become unusable). A usage example is also provided.

Runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows

Fische was originally designed to work on Linux kernel-based operating systems, but it was reported to work on Microsoft’s Windows 7 and 8, as well as Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems as well. Please note that both 64-bit and 32-bit CPU architectures are supported at this time.

What is new in this release:

• ...just a small bugfix. Switching to nervous mode at runtime (N) was broken...

What is new in version 4.0.2:

• The pause feature was re-added like in fische3.

What is new in version 4.0.1:

• Some bugs were fixed.

What is new in version 4.0.0:

• This version no longer does any sound recording.
• This may seem strange, but there are tools (such as sox) that are so much better at reading and converting sound.
• Therefore, it will from now on only accept data on stdin.
• It uses OpenGL, which also makes it more flexible.
• Resizing a window is now easily possible, including to fullscreen, while having separated the CPU and RAM demand from the window size.

What is new in version 3.2.2:

• Fische has received support for clean exit on Ctrl^C.
• Other changes are purely cosmetical.

What is new in version 3.2.1:

• Version 3.2.0 introduced an FTBFS. Linux users please update

What is new in version 3.2.0:

• Fische has been improved in many areas.
• Beat detection has been enhanced, colour changes make more sense, performance was drastically improved, and the code was cleaned up.

What is new in version 3.1.4a:

• Unfortunately, fische 3.1.4 introduced a very annoying bug, that rendered the configuration file useless.

What is new in version 3.1.3:

• This release includes support for PortAudio input, as well as binaries for Windows and Mac OS X
• Fullscreen switching should now work on all operating systems.