Do you love music? Do you love screensavers? Do you love visualizations? We do, which is why we are excited about Plane9, a free software which installs as a screensaver or plugin for Winamp and Windows Media Player.
It detects and reacts to any playing music on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and acts as a global music visualizer for your machine regardless of sources (iTunes, Spotify, a browser, or any other music source).
Plane9 also provides a visualization editor that lets you create your own visualizations, and community of users that create and share visualizations that you can add to the 150 or so it comes with, and mix and match your favorites.
Things I like about this:
- Works with any music source on your PC.
- Comes with a wide range of nice visualizations (over 150+)
- A visualization editor is bundled with the install, that lets you create your own visualizations if you like.
- You can share your creations with the Plan9 community and install user-created visualizations. Note that if you are trying to download a user created scene but cannot find the download link, it’s probably because the visualization is already included in the software.
- There’s a way to set a keyboard shortcut to run the screensaver at any time (see the FAQ).
The editor: Is very interesting, and is based in large part on drag and drop. I didn’t play too much with it, but the screenshot below should give an idea on what is involved in making your own visualization. Full instructions can be found here.
Free vs. paid: the free version allows only one user project (i.e. collection of scenes, like a playlist, to be played when the screensaver started), while you can have multiples in the paid version. The latter also grants access to a handful of exclusive scenes.
The verdict:
This product deserves a lot of credit not just because it you with terrific visualizations but a creative outlet and a community to boot. This project project and community are certainly worth supporting by purchasing a registration.
With more than 150+ Plan9 is a great screensaver regardless of whether or not you are playing music. We love screensavers (check out our article entitled ‘Ten Must Have Screensavers for Windows’), and Plane9 is going to join our list of terrific screensavers that everyone must check out.
Get Plane9 here.
