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My initial thought was to upload audio files to YouTube along with video that is inspired from the audio. The particular visualization can be in different form such as spectrum, spectogram, or other forms of visualizations that change with the audio. I'm not familiar with all the capabilities of ffmpeg or sox, but I wonder if I can do something like this out of the box, or as a series of scripts with other command line utilities.

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Audio visualization with ffmpeg

Audio visualization with ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex \
"[0:a]avectorscope=s=640x518,pad=1280:720[vs]; \
 [0:a]showspectrum=mode=separate:color=intensity:scale=cbrt:s=640x518[ss]; \
 [0:a]showwaves=s=1280x202:mode=line[sw]; \
 [vs][ss]overlay=w[bg]; \
 [bg][sw]overlay=0:H-h,drawtext=fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/TTF/Vera.ttf:fontcolor=white:x=10:y=10:text='\"Song Title\" by Artist'[out]" \
-map "[out]" -map 0:a -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 18 -c:a copy output.mkv

ffmpeg can use several filters to visualize audio: avectorscope, showspectrum, and showwaves. You can then place them where you want with overlay, and then add text with drawtext.

In the example above the audio is stream copied (re-muxed) instead of being re-encoded.

From FFmpeg Wiki: How to Encode Videos for YouTube and other Video Sharing Sites.

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    +1 for the link so I could search on ffmpeg showspectrum - the FFmpeg examples are too complicated for me.
    – Sun
    Nov 27, 2014 at 22:09
  • @sunk818 It just takes some practice. You can just copy and paste the command and it will do as shown above. You may have to adjust the fontfile if you decide you want to add text too, or just remove the drawtext part.
    – llogan
    Nov 27, 2014 at 23:06
  • the fontfile gave me an error and I wasn't too interested in figuring out the syntax for Windows
    – Sun
    Nov 27, 2014 at 23:17
  • Great answer, worked out of the box for me on Ubuntu 22. For those curious to see what it would look like in motion, I uploaded a video of this exact output: youtu.be/iXm3CKdDnd0
    – rlittles
    Jul 16 at 1:13
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Here are some examples for taking an audio file, running it through ffmpeg, and have a video created based on some of the filters available in ffmpeg.

Examples:

spectogram:

ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -filter_complex showspectrum=mode=separate:color=intensity:slide=1:scale=cbrt -y -acodec copy video.mp4

spectogram

avectorscope:

ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -filter_complex avectorscope=s=320x240 -y -acodec copy video.mp4

avectorscope

zooming mandelbrot:

ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -f lavfi -i mandelbrot=s=320x240 -y -acodec copy video.mp4

(Screenshot missing)

source: [Libav-user] ffmpeg showspectrum to file

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  • I get Codec not supported: VLC could not decode the format " " (No description for this codec) unless I change "mp4" to "mkv". But +1 anyway because these were helpful examples.
    – Ryan
    Aug 7, 2018 at 19:18
  • Another one is showwaves: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex showwaves=s=1280x202:mode=line -acodec copy video.mp4
    – Flimm
    Oct 27, 2020 at 12:11
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I use this:

ffmpeg -y -i audio.mp3 -loop 1 -i image.jpg -filter_complex "[1:v]crop=640:480:0:0,setsar=1[img]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=line:s=hd480:[email protected]|[email protected]:scale=sqrt,format=yuva420p[waves]; [img][waves]overlay=format=auto,drawtext=text='${NAME}':[email protected]:fontsize=30:font=Arvo:x=(w-text_w)/5:y=(h-text_h)/5[out]" -map "[out]" -map 0:a -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:a 360k -r:a 44100 -c:v libx264 -q:v 23 -preset ultrafast -c:a copy -shortest out.mkv

It's a "standing wave" effect on top of an image with overlayed text (e.g. track name)

So I take a JPG image from unsplash, put in folder as "image.jpg". Then I take audio.mp3 and combine with wave effect into a 480p video. I guess you can adjust 480p to HD.

[visual effects illustration

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