Pheasant CouchHomebrew Music Visualizer
Pick songs saved on your phone or computer and watch them. Every frame is drawn from the sound as it plays: nine scenes, a theater mode that fills the screen, and a record button that saves the show as a video. No microphone, nothing uploaded.
Ready
This browser can’t run the visualizer (it needs Web Audio). Try a current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.
Songs
MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, FLAC or OGG, from your phone’s Files app or any folder on your computer. Or drop files anywhere on the page. Songs inside Spotify or Apple Music are locked and won’t open; see the notes.
No songs yet. Add some, or press the demo loop to see it move.
Nothing of your own handy?
Where the music goes
Press play and it draws. Swipe or use the arrow keys for the next scene, tap the picture to hide the controls, and Fill the screen turns the whole display into the show.
Nothing playing
0:00 / --:--
Recording 0:00
Space bar plays and pauses. Left and right arrows change the scene. F fills the screen; Escape brings the page back.
Nine ways to see a song
Each scene reads something different out of the sound. Pick one and it stays; pick Auto and the scenes take turns every half minute and on every new song. The color button on the screen swaps the palette for all of them; Spectrum drifts through every hue there is.
Save the show as a video
Press Record and the current song starts over, plays through, and comes down as a video file with the sound in it: the scene you picked, the colors you picked, ready for YouTube, a lyric video, or a visualizer for a track with no footage. It records while it plays, so a four-minute song takes four minutes.
Add a song first. The demo loop can’t be recorded, only songs in the list.
- A WebM video (an MP4 on Safari) with the song’s audio inside, named after the song and the scene, like
night-drive_corona.webm - Drawn at the size you choose, whatever your screen is doing; keep this tab in front while it records
- Yours to use in anything, paid or not; no credit needed. The music is yours to clear, not ours: use songs you made or have the right to use
What it is, and what it isn’t
Why there’s no microphone
Most phone visualizer apps listen through the microphone, which means they also hear the room, the dog and the traffic, and the picture lags a beat behind. This one is the player: it reads the sound straight from the file as it plays, so the picture lands exactly on the beat and it never asks for microphone permission. The trade is that it needs a file it can open.
The files it can open
MP3, M4A and AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG and Opus: anything your browser can play. On a phone they have to be real files in the Files app (iPhone) or a folder (Android), not songs downloaded inside Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube Music; those are locked to their apps and no website can open them. Bandcamp purchases, CD rips and your own exports all work.
Phone and computer
It runs the same on both. On a phone, Fill the screen covers the display and the controls tuck away while the music plays; a tap brings them back. On iPhone, Safari can’t go full screen, so the page fills the browser instead; adding it to your home screen gets rid of the bars. The screen stays awake while a song plays, where the browser allows it.
How it listens
Every frame, the sound in flight is split into sixty-four frequency bands, spaced the way hearing is (a lot of bands in the bass, where the kick and the bass line live, fewer up top), and each band is measured against its own recent loudness so a quiet high-hat still shows next to a loud bass. A separate watcher looks for sudden jumps in the bass and calls those the kicks; the shockwaves, the warp speed and the floor grid all run off it.
Recording the video
Record uses your browser’s own video recorder, so there is no upload, no queue and no watermark. It draws at the size you choose, 720p, 1080p, vertical or square, whatever your screen is doing, and the song is mixed in untouched. The file is WebM in Chrome, Edge and Firefox and MP4 in Safari; every editor and every video site takes both. A phone can stutter at 1080p; 720p is safe anywhere.
Flashing light
Heretic flashes red on hard kicks and Panic tears the picture sideways; the others glow and move but don’t strobe. If flashing light bothers you, or someone watching with you, leave those two out. With “reduce motion” switched on in your phone or computer’s settings, Heretic never flashes and Panic never tears, and every scene calms down.
Private by design
The songs are opened in your browser and played there. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is kept, and the page has no account to make. Closing the tab forgets the list. The ad on this page is Google’s, and the privacy page says what that means.
Your music, or music you may use
Use it on songs you made, bought, or have permission to use. A video you post has the song in it, and the song’s owner, not this page, decides whether that is allowed. Don’t use it to pass off someone else’s music as yours. You’re responsible for what you make with it.
The house band
Under the songs list there’s a quiet line that puts on Zakk M.G.’s Automaton Drafting Band: seven of Zakk’s own songs, from Chrome Nebula Shuffle to Into the Void, cleared for anything on this page. Press B and it does the same. The two albums, Behold and Behold: the Present!, are on Spotify and YouTube Music; the lyrics live on this site.
Why it was built
Zakk makes music as Zakk M.G.’s Automaton Drafting Band and wanted to watch the albums on a phone without handing a microphone to an app or uploading the tracks to a site that renders a video for a fee. So it became the fourth free tool on the couch, next to the voice modulator and the vocal tuner.