Filed under: Tips and tricks, iTunes
Splash that iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors
iPodHacks has a very easy way to display your iTunes visualizer across multiple monitors using Mac OS X's built-in accessibility zoom feature.
The instructions show you how to enable Zoom in the Universal Access system preference pane. When the visualizer is playing, you can zoom in on the iTunes window, and the image of the window is spread across all your screens.
The quality of the zoom, of course, is a bicubic interpolation of the screen image, so it's not as crisp as it could be. Also, the fluidity of the display depends greatly on how powerful your video card is, and how it's connected to your computer. Multiple video cards also don't necessarily help, unlike with the original Magnetosphere visualizer.
For a party, though, it's a neat trick. If you have other ways to make this happen, feel free to leave a comment!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Felipe Rubio said 2:42PM on 9-11-2008
off topic....
What was that song?
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LD said 3:23PM on 9-11-2008
You must be like 12. That was a very popular song in the 80s, Land Down Under by Men at Work.
BLUEFROG said 2:58PM on 9-11-2008
Cool tip! BTW, "Addicted to Love" was one of my favorite videos in high school! I loved your work with Power Station too! 8^)
Bang-A-Gong!
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Marcos said 3:18PM on 9-11-2008
Multiple monitor support on iTunes sucks.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to show videos or the visulizer on one screen (say, big screen tv at a party) while you edit and search music in the iTunes window on the second screen (say, your MacBooks LCD display)?
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Pepe said 5:25PM on 9-11-2008
Uuuh, but no, that would be so work-like. A feature things like PowerPoint have ;) But seriously, I have been looking for that feature as well. At least it wasn't me. I thought this would be way to obvious and spent too much time trying to find the simple iTunes feature to accomplish this. But yea, this is a feature we need.
slembcke said 3:48PM on 9-11-2008
Actually it's bilinear interpolation. Bicubic is much more expensive. ;)
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Scott said 4:35PM on 9-11-2008
I agree with Marcos. I would like full screen to be selectable so you can continue to select/cue up tracks on the other one.
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Shunnabunich said 5:24PM on 9-11-2008
Am I the only one who thinks the iTunes 8 version of Magnetosphere looks like absolute ass compared to the original? I think that kinda makes a tip like this a moot point. :P
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aMac said 8:51PM on 9-11-2008
Agreed. Before I tried it, I was excited about having magnetosphere updated by apple, but I think I much prefer the original.
The original was a lot more random and jumpy (in a good way) and there's some effects that I really enjoyed like the red ribbons-like mode, which isn't in the Apple release.
I'm just glad I never deleted the original, seeing as its been pulled from download for so long
Shunnabunich said 9:49PM on 9-11-2008
Same here. I'm not sure when I installed it, but I'm glad I did.
caleb.Lyons said 1:20PM on 9-12-2008
Has anyone else been hit with a kernel panic during full screen use of the new iTunes visualizer?
It's happened to me twice already.
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Multiple Monitors said 10:17PM on 11-01-2008
I got a SUPER PC quad lcd computer from http://Multi-Monitors.com a few months ago and Multiple Monitors are frikin awesome! I tried this trick on my pc and it rocks, even though I have windows.
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