Of course I used Winamp to play my handful of MP3s. Sometimes I stared at the mesmerizing, colorful, friendly and uplifting visuals that double-clicking on the bouncy bars would get you: AVS, the “Advanced Visualization Studio”.

But ever since accidentally right-clicking on the AVS window to discover the builtin editor sometime in 2004 or 2005 or so, I’ve been enamored with the amount of fun that I could have, and the ways I could express myself, in that particular rabbit hole.

There’s a whole bucket of easily-accessible effects that could be just added in, with simple sliders, checkboxes and color choosers that would immediately change what would happen next. Your personal little pixel aquarium with a very fancy stick to stir and whip its contents into so many shapes. It invited you to just play or to realize a vision, a toy and a tool at the same time. And always it allowed both, to play with the vision as it emerged, in your mind and on-screen. After that, learning AVS’s builtin scripting language allowed you to go almost arbitrarily far—and many people did. With or without code, AVS allowed you to develop a personal style and as a result whole sub-genres and taxonomies of flavors emerged over time.

Around 2006 (a.k.a. six years too late) I found an online community of like-minded people on the Winamp Forums, DeviantArt and on IRC. I also met quite a few people in person over the years, first toniq, whom I mistook for Tonic, in my hometown. Later I visited Yathosho, micro.D, and even met framesofreality for about 30 minutes. Before that, in the final throes of school, there I met Lukas, a.k.a HuRriC4nE back then, or exo-cortex these days. Together, as Effekthasch, we did some of both our best work, performed an ever-evolving greatest hits playlist of AVS from many artists in clubs in Berlin for over a year around 2013, and to that end even designed our own VJ mixing software enabling us to play presets much like a DJ plays their records.

AVS’s quirky EEL scripting language was my second introduction to programming (after a stint with Flash some years before). While I was getting better at creating code-heavy presets, the community was already fading around me. The AVS scene had felt stagnant for quite a while. Reasons included the lack of development of AVS itself, the parent Winamp losing popularity and many AVS creators moving on to greener pastures, as screen sizes doubled and doubled again (while AVS’s speed did not) and more exciting tools became available.

But still AVS held a special place in the hearts of all of us, as a potent catalyst for creative expression, learning tool and favorite toy. Seeing it dwindle filled many with nostalgia. When the source code to AVS was released in 2005, it gave rise to a forum thread of hope, and the same in 2010, when original author Justin Frankel released a new version with a few new language features. But each time the optimism subsided again when no significant updates emerged.

Over all this time, one thing did grow: The feeling that if AVS were not somehow dragged into the present and possibly the future, then all the fantastic works done by many great artists would be forever locked in a legacy plugin for a legacy media player, and barely hinted at by blurry videos that failed to capture most of the great side-offerings of AVS:

• Visuals created with your music, live in real time,
• Sharp & colorful images, endlessly new, and
• Completely open presets, giving rise to a remixing community rarely equaled.

Quite a suprising amount of rewrites where attempted in the 2010s, all of them by people who weren’t known as AVS artists: There’s a C rewrite aiming at portability and cleanliness, a DirectX11 version leveraging GPUs to achieve (for AVS) ungodly resolutions at the cost of completeness, and a Javascript+WebGL port which promised to bring AVS to the (now web-captured) masses once again. All of these fell somewhat silent before reaching a satisfactory level of compatibility.

Two people who were known (Jheriko and OnionringOfDoom) did something a little different around 2012 and wrote a standalone wrapper for the pre-existing Winamp plugin DLL, allowing you to capture AVS videos from audio files. Dumping the video from AVS was a bit of a hack, the wrapper injecting itself into the preset before loading it with AVS. I never actually tried using it, but apparently it did work.

The version I started is not a rewrite but a continuation on the original source code. It aims for completeness and compatibility first. The initial motivator was to make accessible what we created in the past to a future audience. To that end, AVS’s source code must be put in better shape to be more portable across compilers, and in the future even operating systems. I want this to be an actual continuation of development too.

There’s no saying this attempt will fare any better than others, but at least I tried to avoid the trope of starting-fresh-then-falling-short by never straying far from 100%. Starting from the old code and iteratively cleaning up instead of a big-swoop rewrite, has so far resulted in an AVS that is highly compatible while laying the ground work for future development and ports.

I start this blog and write this post after having already done a lot of cleanup and at a time when AVS already compiles with GCC. But it is also the first day of a whole year off for me. No regular work, no other todos in the way. Just a list of exciting projects with AVS at the top of the list.

Here’s to hoping I can make good use of it.