Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo.
At first blush, it seems absurd. At second blush, you may be blushing precisely because of how obvious it is. I thought about this possibility shortly after reading about the rumored new visualizer in iTunes 8. While not a revolutionary leap, consider the gap: most VJ (Video Jockey) software is hard to use but can produce spectacular effects. Their much simpler siblings, music visualizers which "read" the music to provide trippy animations which match what you're hearing, offer some of the same effects but with a limited degree of control — you may be able to cycle through visualizations at the touch of a key like MilkDrop can, but compositing and other fundamentals of a full-fledged VJ program are out of the question.
Why does this make sense? I'll explain: several years ago, it seemed laughable that Apple would enter the audio sequencer market — there were plenty of fine 3rd-party solutions, including Emagic's Logic line. Well, in 2002, Apple bought Emagic, and Logic went Mac-only. Further in the timeline, Apple took the guts of Logic and wove it into GarageBand, an easy way of making your own music, and the audio studio equivalent to what iPhoto does for budding photographers, or what iMovie does for aspiring filmmakers.
