About BeatHarness

Let there be light - God

BeatHarness is a free VJ tool. It can be considered an automatic audio visualizer.

It generates real-time visual effects based on audio (the most typical source would be music playing on your computer).

In short: it plays eye candy that responds to music.
BeatHarness is (by design) a program that mostly works autonomously; user-input is not necessarily required for it to perform well. However, it's possible to add your own content and use the extremely flexible Angelscript language to create your own visual effects and transitions. This makes for a flexible and highly customizable visualization program that requires little user effort and looks pretty neat.

Origins

It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create - John Godfrey Saxe

Just like with any other fun tool, the origins of BeatHarness lie in elegant, simple laziness. The pursuit of World Peace had nothing to do with it. I wanted to project some nice visuals on my living room wall during one of my birthday parties. The only catch was that I didn't feel like being stuck behind a computer constantly tweaking visuals during my own party, so I wanted something that could behave pretty much autonomously without looking like a bad headache. Since nothing available at that time could measure up, I wrote my own plugin for Winamp and called it BeatHarness. BeatHarness was released to the public in 2004 as a Winamp visualization plugin. While development on the Winamp version has ceased in march 2005, it is still frequently downloaded from the Winamp website. The latest version of BeatHarness is a standalone VJ program that can react to any sound source your PC can record / play.

Brilliant design

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry