milkdrop

MILKDROP — a Winamp/Milkdrop music visualizer (wrapping the open-source butterchurn WebGL2 engine + ~20 curated classic presets) as a fully CV-instrumented video SOURCE. Patch audio into AUDIO and the visuals react (the tap is inaudible). The novel part: butterchurn drives nearly all preset motion from three audio scalars — bass/mid/treb — and MILKDROP lets a cable REPLACE any of them. Patch CV into BASS/MID/TREB to drive that band from the cable instead of the live audio (an unpatched band still follows the audio); REACT scales all three. SPEED time-warps the engine clock (clamped at 0), PRESET selects the active preset (quantized knob/CV), MORPH sets the crossfade seconds, and a rising edge on NEXT advances presets hands-free. OUT is a normal downstream video texture (route into a mixer / keyer / OUTPUT). The card has a live preview + preset name/index readout + RCT/SPD/PST/MPH knobs, and hide-controls turns it into a resizable monitor. The butterchurn engine lives in node_modules (not vendored into the WebGL attest basis) and the preset pack loads behind a dynamic import() as a separate chunk. All ports live on the yellow drill-down PATCH PANEL (no raw side jacks, #767).

MILKDROP is a Winamp-style Milkdrop music visualizer as a fully CV-instrumented video SOURCE. It wraps the open-source butterchurn engine (a WebGL2 reimplementation of Ryan Geiss's Milkdrop) and a curated set of ~20 classic Flexi/Geiss/Martin presets, then exposes the parts that actually drive the look as patchable CV. Patch any audio into the AUDIO input and the visuals react to it: a mono mix plus left/right channels are tapped (the audio is TAP-ONLY and inaudible — a silent gain-0 keep-alive runs the tap without routing to the speakers, so feed AUDIO OUT separately to hear it). The novel part is the per-band CV: butterchurn drives nearly all preset motion from three audio scalars — bass, mid, treb — and MILKDROP lets a cable REPLACE any of them. Patch a CV/LFO/envelope into BASS, MID, or TREB and that band is driven by the cable instead of the live audio (an unpatched band still follows the audio); the REACT control scales all three at once. SPEED is a time-warp (it scales how fast butterchurn's internal clock advances, clamped at zero — turn it down to slow the motion, up to speed it up). PRESET selects which of the curated presets is showing (a quantized index, knob or CV), MORPH sets the crossfade time when the preset changes, and a rising edge on NEXT advances to the next preset hands-free (clock it from a sequencer to switch presets in time). The output is a normal downstream video texture: route OUT into a mixer, keyer, effect, or OUTPUT. With nothing patched it still animates (the preset runs on its own clock) and shows the current preset; there is a live preview screen, and two switches beside it that do opposite things: SCREEN turns the preview off to reclaim its space (the module goes on rendering either way), and MONITOR hides the control bands so the picture has the whole plate to itself - drag the bottom-right corner to size it, and click MONITOR again to bring the controls back. Either way it is a viewport only; neither changes the output resolution. The legacy card also prints a preset name/index readout; on the faceplate the name is the picker's selected entry instead. To LOAD/BROWSE presets directly, the card has a searchable preset PICKER (a dropdown listing every curated preset by name) — picking one loads it with a MORPH-second crossfade and is the same selection the PRESET knob, the PRESET CV jack, and the NEXT trigger drive (they stay in sync). A "Load .milk…" button imports a classic Winamp Milkdrop `.milk` preset file straight from disk: the file is converted to butterchurn's format in the browser (via milkdrop-preset-converter) and appended to the picker for the rest of the session (custom imports are in-session only and are not saved with the patch; the curated PRESET index IS saved).

the faceplate

inputs

outputs

params

controls

source

milkdrop.ts on GitHub.