Install on Windows

A music visualizer that listens to whatever your PC is playing and draws to it.

This is an early test build. It is not code-signed, so Windows will warn about it once. Nothing to install - unzip anywhere and run ritmolux.exe.

1. Let it run

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Windows SmartScreen will say “Windows protected your PC” because the build is not signed. Click “More info”, then “Run anyway”. Only needed the first time.

If you unzipped straight from the browser download and it behaves oddly, right- click the .zip first, choose Properties, and tick Unblock - then unzip again.

2. Play something

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Start any music and the visuals react. There is no setup: the app captures whatever your PC is already playing, through the default output device.

If the visuals move but never react to the beat, they are running on the idle animation because no audio reached the app. The app says why:

• Press F3. Under the diagnostics panel there is a line starting with “audio”. If it starts with “live WASAPI” then sound is reaching the app - the rest of the line is the format and the device it is listening to, so check that something is playing and that it is playing out of that device. If it reads “failed WASAPI …” then the rest of that line is the reason. If it reads “lost WASAPI …” the input went away mid-run and could not be reopened; pick one again from the S menu’s Input rows.

• Or open diagnostics.log (section 4, below). Its last column is named “capture” and carries the same sentence on every row.

Either one is worth sending back on its own.

3. Controls

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Space   next preset
Tab     browse all presets (arrows to move, Enter to pick, Esc to close)
S       settings (quality, fullscreen, display)
F       fullscreen
D       move to the next monitor
F3      show frame rate and diagnostics
A       auto-rotate presets on/off (off by default)

Alt-F4, or close the window, to quit. Escape only closes a menu - it does not quit the app, so leave fullscreen with F first.

If the frame rate in F3 is poor, press [ to drop to the lighter quality tier (] raises it again). The app also does this on its own if it cannot hold the frame budget.

4. Where it keeps its files

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%APPDATA%\Ritmolux\

Paste that into the Explorer address bar. It holds an editable copy of the presets, a config.toml with your settings, and diagnostics.log. Deleting the folder resets the app; it is recreated on the next launch.

The presets folder next to this file is a reference copy you can read. The app does not load it - it has its own built in.

5. Sending the picture into TouchDesigner (optional)

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This build can run with NO WINDOW and hand its picture straight to another application on the same PC - TouchDesigner, Resolume, OBS - over Spout. No recording, no codec, a frame or two of delay.

ritmolux.exe —stream —size 1280x720 —fps 60

Then in TouchDesigner add a “Syphon Spout In” TOP (that is its real name; there is no operator called just “Spout In”) and set its Sender Name to what the window-less run prints, usually:

publishing 1280x720 at 60 fps as Spout sender ‘Ritmolux’

Nothing to configure for colour - it should look the same as the app does.

IF YOU GET NOTHING, AND YOUR LAPTOP HAS TWO GRAPHICS CHIPS, this is almost certainly why. Spout can only hand a picture to a program running on the SAME graphics chip, and Windows gives a window-less program the power-saving one while TouchDesigner uses the fast one. Run:

ritmolux.exe —list-adapters

and then name the one TouchDesigner is using:

ritmolux.exe —stream —gpu “RTX 3080”

Ctrl-C stops it and prints how many frames it sent.

Spout is a separate open-source project (Simplified BSD); its copyright notice is the spout-license.txt beside this file.

6. What to send back

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Five things, however roughly:

• Did it run at all, and what did SmartScreen do?
• Do the visuals react to music? If not, what does F3’s “audio” line say?
• What frame rate does F3 show, and does it say the quality tier was dropped?
• What graphics card do you have?
• The contents of diagnostics.log from the folder in step 4.

Thank you - this build exists to find out what breaks.