A Visualizer for Rainmeter.
One of the greatest progressive rock albums of all time is Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). After the album's release, it remained on the Billboard Top 100 charts in the US for a whopping 954 weeks (that's more than 18 years and 4 months!).
Anyone who's heard of Pink Floyd, or The Dark Side of the Moon (aka, DSOTM), has certainly seen one of the most iconic album covers ever made: completely black, with no title or name of the band, just a prism refracting a beam of white light. Inside the gatefold cover, along with the song lyrics, the refracted light beam continues across -- with the signature "heartbeat" -- and wraps around to the back cover. The back contains another prism, concentrating the prismatic rays back into a white ray of light which wraps around to the front, to start the cycle over again.
Back in 2018, I decided to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the album by creating a visualizer in the style of the album cover, using nothing but Shape meters and math. Ha! I never completed the task due to the complexity involved, but I finally completed it over a long weekend in 2020. While not quite as cool as the real thing, this visualizer comes as close as I can get without a gatefolding double-sided monitor.
NOTE: Because this visualizer spans the complete width of your monitor, it is set to "click-through" so as to not interfere with your Windows desktop. The downside is that there is no way to interact with the skin. A Settings skin is provided and must be loaded either with the Rainmeter Manage dialog or by using the Rainmeter taskbar icon to select it.
Also, this skin is a visualizer only. It cannot and will not control your media player. You can use your preferred player skin for this task.
There are only a few simple settings for the visualizer.
- Click the moon to toggle the visualizer on/off.
- Select your preferred media player from the list (these are players supported natively by Rainmeter).
- Queue up the album (preferably the remastered 5.1 mix), turn out the lights, and crank the volume! (Also playing the Wizard of Oz is optional.)
- Keep your eyes peeled for easter eggs... 😉
For best appearance, and to show the world how much of a die-hard Floyd fan you are, set your desktop wallpaper to solid black, like the album cover. Lesser fans can opt for a near-black desktop, though you may invite mild derision for your lack of dedication.
- Dark Side of the Moon by SilverAzide.
- ConfigActive plugin by JSMorley.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
