Another update

Well, I think it should work on vista and windows 7 now, although it *might* have issues on 64 bit windows, as I have been unable to test it on one.
There remains one bug, an error when windows media player 9 closes, although it is hard to trigger, so it might even be gone by now, and probably does not occur in more recent versions.
Download the updated version.





Update!

I realized what might be causing incompatibilities with newer versions of windows. The registry. Specifically, XP doesn't have nearly as strict registry control by default as newer versions of windows.
I have modified the registration process to use less access than before.

Also a new feature: In "Internals" mode, there are three pixels at the top middle of the visualization. If you click in the first 100 pixels of the row it is in, it will move to the left. Otherwise, clicking in it's row will move it to the right. As it moves to the left, the corresponding decay rate will increase. Right causes a decrease. Increasing the decay will make it more sensitive to beats, but it may have more false beats detected. This is where you can help. By finding your favourite locations of the three pixels, and sending them to me, I can find the most popular levels and make them the default.
Download the updated version.
(In find that red left three, green left four, and blue left 2 gives better sensitivity. However, dropping all of them drastically didn't seem too bad, either.)



New version!

This second version can coexist with the first, and should be more stable(hopefully) and *possibly*(though unlikely) work on more systems.

Most of the fixes for stability have been added to the old version.

Download.

Also, if it doesn't work on your system, you *could* try putting it in the visualizations subfolder of windows media player. However, like all other information here, it has been sparse and misleading, almost as if they are trying to make *not* using their supported tools, libraries, compilers, and programming language as hard as possible to use. (And, if it didn't assume access to atl, I would have used it and everything would have worked fairly well with fewer bugs and less development time... But atl is no longer included in the free version of MSVC.)





Update once more

During the first effort I put into making a new version, I found that, as expected, I was taking a linear sample of exponential data. More importantly, I found the stupid mistake that was preventing it from switching to the visualization after startup(Lesson: watch your hresults, and don't use E_NOTIMPL, even as a placeholder, unless it is a valid hresult for that function, because forgetting to replace it may have unintended results.)

Just because that little bug could get so annoying, here is a version that will actually switch properly.
Download.




Update

Well, after a little bit of testing(I didn't like the flicker, and was going to see if I could get double-buffering working), I found that PFD_SUPPORT_GDI, that I added while simply trying to get something to appear on screen, was entirely unnessecary. Surprisingly, as a result, it is far faster and doesn't flicker at all!

So, with such an improvement in speed, I have decided to add line antialiasing and release a second version. This will likely be the last version for a while, as I think I will make a second one that responds to the variance in the data rather than the data directly(basically, responding to beats more than overall volume in a certain pitch range), and properly; rather than linearily as it currently is, as exponential like sound actually is.



Download the improved version.



Warning: This is neither finished nor thoroughly tested.



If you do use it, any unwanted side effects are your problem.

With that done, here is a description:
This is a Windows Media Player visualization based on Homestuck by Andrew Hussie.

It tries to at least slightly imitate the loader seen here.



Due to the fact that a visualization is "simply" a COM object implementing a specific interface, to "install" it requires registering it in the registry. However, as usual for COM DLLs, it has a function to register itself. If you *do* try it, you need to run "register.bat" to get it to show up in Windows Media Player. Furthermore, if you ever move the .dll, you would need to run register.bat once again, to update the location. Both register.bat and unregister.bat require to be in the same directory.

It has bugs, though hopefully nothing fatal, that could be fixed "easily" by using ATL, but ATL requires Microsoft's C++ compiler, and does not come with the Express (free) edition.

For those of you brave enough to continue, you can get it here.
One problem, that I don't even know the cause of, is that it cannot start after another visualization has been started, so to get it to display requires restarting Windows Media Player.