Holy Winamp! Opera puts a music visualizer inside its browser
It won’t whip the llama’s ass, but Opera has added a Spotify viewer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser.
Known as Sonic, the viewer will be part of Opera’s Dynamic Themes, which uses the WebGPU standard to use a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It’s basically a shader that uses your PC’s graphics engine to generate an animated background.
The browser also comes with a music player, set to Spotify by default. Users will have the option to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said.
Opera’s Sonic theme (which has nothing to do with the Sega game and/or accompanying cartoon and movie franchise) takes the Spotify input and turns it into a dynamic background.
“With Sonic Theme, the browser captures audio from the sidebar and converts it into a power spectrum texture, where one axis represents frequency and the other represents time,” Opera said in a blog post. “This texture is passed to the shader, where each pixel samples the current audio intensity using its on-screen position and animation-driven coordinates. The shader applies a frequency compensation curve to balance the spectrum and generates an amplitude value that drives the animation, color, and other visual effects in sync with the music. So if this all sounds complicated, just remember that everything you see on screen is completely unique to what you’re listening to.”
Sonic is an interesting touch. As any old tech lead knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which synchronized visualizations with the rhythm and flow of the music being played. Winamp quietly returned in 2022, then received another update in 2023.
Is Opera’s Sonic as good as Winamp? At this point, I wouldn’t say it. But Opera has many more resources than the small Winamp team. And who knows? Further iterations could make it something special.
Opera One is free and separate from the company’s Opera Neon AI browser and the Opera GX browser for gamers, each with its own unique features.
