Changelog

2026-09-12 — Galaxy: flow instead of everything reacting at once

• The problem, stated plainly: an earlier pass bound every element in every scene to a frequency band. That made the scenes respond, but it also meant everything twitched at once, so a quiet intro looked much like a drop and nothing landed. More reactivity was the wrong fix.
• A structure layer above reactivity. Galaxy now works out, from the same audio, which voice is carrying the track right now (bass, mid, highs or drums), where you are in the four-bar phrase, whether this is an intro, groove, build, drop or breakdown, and — most importantly — a budget for how much of the scene may move at all. Scenes give the leading voice the foreground and hold the rest back.
• Measured, not asserted. A 60-second test track with labelled sections and a known tempo now ships with the tests. Against it: tempo locks exactly, the lead voice changes about four times a minute rather than every frame, and the motion budget runs 0.11 in an intro against 0.73 in a drop.
• A test for the actual complaint. A new harness plays that track and measures how much the picture really moves in each section. Scenes with the flow pass applied move 3.2x more in a drop than in an intro; scenes without it average 2.0x, and the worst moved more in the intro than in the drop. That number is now the thing to beat.
• Two findings worth recording. Sections have to be judged per bar, not per frame — judging per frame produced a section change every 1.5 seconds. And a drop cannot be detected by loudness, because the analysis normalises level: the drop measures the same as the groove even when it is far louder in the file. It is detected as a transition instead, when the riser collapses while the beat continues.
• All 27 scenes rebuilt. Every scene now has a cast — a lead element the eye follows, a support layer that answers it, and a bed that establishes the place and barely moves. The lead expresses whichever voice is carrying the track; everything else is held back by the motion budget. Structural changes land on the 4-bar line rather than wherever the track happened to be: the wormhole reverses its spiral handedness, the galaxy re-aims its spiral pitch, Pulse City steps its turntable an eighth-turn, Spectrum Sea veers the wind, and Deep Field lights a single distant galaxy.
• Measured before and after. On the same eight scenes, motion in a drop versus a quiet intro went from 2.6x to 4.7x, and no scene is flat any more. The worst case beforehand was the Wormhole at 0.67x — it moved more in the intro than the drop; it now measures 14x. Two scenes regressed during the pass and were caught by the test: Aurora and Nebula were driven by band content that is louder in a pad-only intro than in a drop, with a floor under their focus gate, so they streamed during the quietest passage. Both are fixed.
• For reference, the 2D app scores 67x on the same test, because its scenes go almost completely still in an intro. That is the number Galaxy is still chasing, and it is now a number rather than an opinion.
• Galaxy is easier to find: twelve new pages covering the scenes and ideas people actually search for, three in-depth articles on how the black hole, the camera and the structure detection work, and 22 existing pages now link into the 3D app, which was previously a dead end in the site.

2026-09-11 — Choosing a colour now actually chooses a colour

• The bug: a palette is three colours, and scenes spread them across the frequency range — bass got one, mids another, highs a third. So picking "a blue palette" still put two other hues on screen, and which colour you saw where moved with the music. It read as a hue shift that was always on, and it made colour impossible to pin down.
• New setting, first thing in the colour controls: how colour is used. All three is the old behaviour. Two is a single gradient between your first and last colour, blended along the colour wheel so it cannot invent a third hue at the midpoint. One colour is exactly the colour you picked, everywhere — pitch shows as brightness instead of hue, so the picture keeps its depth and bass still reads darker than treble.
• Applied at the source rather than per scene, so it governs every colour the app can draw: spectrum blends, glows, particle tints and the background wash. Measured on a three-colour palette, One colour takes the spread of hues on screen from 21 degrees to 6.

2026-09-11 — The interface, rebuilt around what you are trying to do

• BLOOB's control drawer had 147 controls across five tabs and sixteen collapsible groups, arranged by which part of the code owned them. The worst screen showed 32 sliders at once, 18 of them greyed out because Auto-Director was driving them. It now opens on 16, across four places named for what you are doing: Look · Music · Video · Set up. Forty-six controls are reachable without opening anything; the rest sit behind fifteen labelled doors. Nothing became unreachable.
• Looks lead. The curated one-tap looks were buried inside a collapsed group; they are now the first thing you see, each tinted with its own palette. Palettes became swatches instead of a dropdown, and the visual opens the live-preview picker rather than a list of twenty names.
• Fewer, better controls. Three frame-motion checkboxes became one Camera: Locked · Float · Punch · Both. Three envelope numbers became one Response. Export leads with three shape chips and a single button. The "Essentials / Everything" switch is gone — asking someone to classify themselves before they have seen anything is a sign the structure underneath was wrong.
• Galaxy got the same treatment: 34 controls above the fold down to 18, a panel that scrolled 4502px now scrolling 1340, a shell of fifteen controls down to nine, and six large look cards at the top. Nine export settings became three recipes, and the file type stopped being a question — it detects whether your browser can write MP4 and says which it chose.
• Plain language throughout. No FFT smoothing, chroma split, render scale or LUFS on the surface. "Space warp" is Lens bend, "Graphics quality" is how hard this machine works, and frame shapes are Screen, Wide, Vertical and Square with the shapes drawn.
• Streaming, done honestly. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube deliver DRM-protected audio that no web page is permitted to analyse — that is a browser rule, not a missing feature. So instead of a generic "Browser tab" button, there is now a source picker: choose Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, SoundCloud or any tab, we open it for you, and one Connect button walks you through sharing that tab's audio. On a device that cannot do it at all, it says so instead of hiding the button.
• Two real bugs fixed on the way: the focus trap picked elements the browser then refused to focus, so shift-tab fell out of dialogs; and the on-canvas title collided with the top bar. Recordings and exports capture the canvas only, so they keep their original composition — only the live view steps clear.

2026-09-10 — Galaxy: a camera that directs, and every scene bound to the sound

• The camera thinks in shots now. It used to glide continuously toward a slowly orbiting target, which is why it never seemed to decide anything. There is now a shot director with nine framings — wide establishing, three-quarter hero, close orbit, low angle, high angle, push-in, pull-back, lateral dolly and locked-off. It holds a framing for a musically sized number of bars and then changes it on the music: hard on a drop, opening out when a build resolves, settling when a section goes quiet. Shot length is counted in bars from the detected tempo, never in seconds, and in silence the camera stops dead on a single frame.
• Portrait no longer cuts scenes in half. The field of view is vertical, and nothing used to compensate for the shape of the window, so on a phone held upright every scene lost most of its horizontal view and the subject fell out of frame sideways. The camera now steps back by exactly what the narrow axis lost, so the same composition reads on a laptop and on a phone.
• Framing is composed around what each scene actually asks for. A wide shot used to be measured against the furthest the camera had ever been pushed, so one detonation could redefine "wide" for the rest of the track — the Supernova's star shrank to a speck. Shots are now composed around the scene's typical distance.
• All 27 scenes rebound to the sound. Every visible element owns one specific thing — a ring is a band, a shard is two bands, a star is one bin — instead of the whole scene riding overall loudness. Each drum does something distinct and pointable: the kick strikes, the snare shears or rips or stamps the row it landed on, the hats sparkle only the treble elements. Builds tense each scene and drops release it, several of which previously ignored both.
• Two scenes were making promises the code did not keep: the Supernova's build had a dead uniform, and Pulse City's ground had no audio input at all. Both are real now.

2026-09-10 — A phone version built for a phone

• The visual is the interface. Swipe across it to change the visual, swipe up for the controls, tap to get them out of the way, swipe down for a clean screen. Every gesture still has a button or a key, so nothing is reachable by gesture alone.
• A bug this uncovered: the first-run help card was a full-width invisible hit target sitting over the middle of a phone screen, quietly swallowing every swipe and tap meant for the visual. It no longer takes touches it doesn't need, and the gestures now work anywhere on the picture rather than only on the bare canvas.
• The screen stays awake while something is playing, recording, or listening to a mic or a tab — and lets go the moment it isn't, so it never holds your battery hostage.
• Share a finished video straight into another app. On a phone, recording ends with a Share button that opens the system share sheet with the file attached, instead of dropping it into a Downloads folder nobody opens.
• Haptics on scene changes, recording and sharing, off automatically when you've asked for reduced motion.
• Deliberately no double-tap gesture: supporting one would mean every single tap waits a third of a second to see whether a second one is coming. Taps act immediately instead.
• The full-height controls sheet now uses the dynamic viewport height, so it no longer hides its own Done button behind a retracting browser toolbar.

2026-09-10 — An honesty pass over every scene, a calmer interface, and 21 more guides

• Every scene now stops when the music stops. We audited all 20 visuals line by line against one rule: nothing moves unless the sound moves it. Removed the free-running wall clocks behind the camera drift, the background wash, the particle field, the tunnel flight, the aurora ribbons, the lattice sway and camera, the galaxy disc, the hyperdrive roll and star twinkle, and the storm's tendrils. There is now a silence test in the build: with no audio loaded, every scene has to be pixel-still, and it is. The one deliberate exception is Wrong Signal, whose whole premise is that no music means lost signal — its static is the honest answer.
• Deep Sonar tells the truth now. The sweep used to be a free clock while the screen said “angle = beat”. It is locked to the detected beat grid, so a kick on beat one really does paint at twelve o'clock, the beat markers flash on the beat they belong to, and the hand stops when the music does.
• Two scene descriptions were wrong and are fixed. Mirror EQ does not put the bass at the centre (it runs low to high, left to right), and Phase Scope is a phase portrait of the waveform, not a stereo field — the app analyses in mono.
• String Rig's frequency ruler was half an octave out. The scale under the strings said 250 Hz where a 349 Hz string actually sat. The strings now line up with their own labels.
• Two “instruments” were reading as noise. The oscilloscope's beam dot and the resonance plate's driver rings were computed from the elapsed timestamp multiplied by a rate that changed every frame, so they teleported instead of travelling. Both are proper accumulators now.
• Geometry no longer jumps on a single frame. Star sizes, the Mirror EQ seam, the beat zoom and the scope's echo trace now use the smoothed envelopes instead of raw one-frame flags, and every whole-frame motion honours the “hold the frame still” switch.
• Interface: the Tune drawer no longer repeats what the dock and top bar already do; the film and glitch looks moved into Look where you can actually find them; sliders that Auto-Director is driving now say so and offer to hand you the controls; recording tells you the file it saved instead of only asking for a tip; the song library is keyboard-reachable; Escape closes dialogs again; focus returns where it came from.
• Phone: the piano drops to one octave so a key is a real finger target, every control clears 44px, the dock stops wrapping, the mood buttons became one chip that cycles instead of disappearing, and the seek handle is visible without hovering. Text contrast raised to pass AA over live video.
• Windows parity: the icons in the toggles, record, export, support and demo buttons were rare Unicode symbols that Segoe UI has no glyph for — they showed as empty boxes on Windows. They are inline SVG now, identical on every platform, and they survive the label updates that used to wipe them.
• Verified on Firefox as well as Chrome, over a new Gecko harness: all 20 scenes render, free play plays, zero console errors.
• 21 new guides — guitar, vocals, drums and synth players; music theory and classroom use; seeing sound waves; hip-hop and classical; worship, weddings, shops and gyms; photosensitivity, accessibility and deaf/hard-of-hearing use; captions, batch album exports; and honest comparisons with Resolume and TouchDesigner. Plus six new blog posts and 43 short links.

2026-09-10 — Free play, a clearer front door, and the last four scenes

• Free play: BLOOB is now an instrument. Press K or choose “Play the keys”: A–L are the white keys, W E T Y U the black keys, Z/X the octave, 1–7 synthesized drums, Space a sustain pedal. Five instruments (Keys, Pluck, Bass, Pad, Bell), a two-octave on-screen keyboard that works by touch, and a MIDI mode for any keyboard or controller (velocity, sustain pedal, pitch bend, mod wheel). The synth is wired into the same analyser as a song, so the visuals react to the real sound — and you can jam over a loaded track.
• Instrument in: guitar, synth or vocals through your interface or mic, one click from the welcome card.
• A front door with three clear choices: play a song · try the demo · go live (mic / browser tab / keys / MIDI). Tune tabs renamed to what they do (Play · Look · Color · Fine-tune · Create). Deep links /?play=keys and /?play=midi.
• Accuracy pass: every motion added this week is audio-fed — the Mirror EQ drum, storm clouds and rain, Hyphal god rays and the Aurora ridges no longer drift on the clock; in silence they stop.
• Resonance Plate: the plate’s real displacement is now shaded as lit metal relief under the sand. String Rig: the neck recedes in perspective from the nut, a soundboard glow breathes with the bass, inlays at the frets, and a detected drop strums all 28 strings with a visible pick. Pendulum Rack: a long-exposure photographic plate collects every bob’s path into the classic pendulum-wave light painting. Deep Sonar: a holographic table — the disc foreshortened, every hit a pin of light whose height is how hard it landed, the sweep dragging a curtain of light, labels floating upright.
• Galaxy plays too: the same free play in 3D — “Play the keys” and “MIDI keyboard” on the Galaxy intro (or press K), five instruments, on-screen keys, drums, sustain, bend and mod wheel, all through Galaxy’s own analyser and kick sensor.
• New guides: MIDI keyboard visualizer, piano visualizer online, play music with your computer keyboard, live instrument visualizer.

2026-09-10 — BLOOB scenes round two: new rendering techniques in every family + a cinema pass

• Cinema pass (all scenes): a second, much wider bloom halo and an anamorphic streak that rides the low end sit on top of the existing bloom — everything bright now has the soft corona of a real lens. New Cinema slider under Render (on by default, cheap: two tiny buffers).
• Nebula: three parallax sheets of pre-rendered filamentary dust (bass / mids / highs), counter-rotating at audio-fed speeds, plus a local gravity-lens zoom on the kick.
• Spectrum Bars: the last second of spectra recedes behind the wall as a perspective spectrogram valley, and the bars stand on black glass with a real mirrored reflection.
• Waveform Tunnel: two counter-wound light helices spiral down the tube, cut from the waveform and fading into the fog.
• Aurora: a moon with a halo and two parallax mountain ridges under the curtains, all mirrored in the lake; crests take rim light from the loudest band.
• Radial Spectrum: a diffraction halo (colour = frequency), the peak envelope mirrored into a mandala, and a nova ring on every detected drop.
• Oscilloscope: a polar spectrum dial around the graticule and scanlines across the tube face.
• Mirror EQ: the LED matrix is wrapped on a cylinder — side columns foreshorten and fall into shadow, the drum sways with the energy, and its dominant band washes the room.
• Liquid BLOOB: a wet reflective floor with a contact shadow and caustic rings that spread with the bass throb.
• Arc Storm: a storm ceiling of opaque cloud lit from within by every flash, and rain whose density is the high end.
• Hyphal Dive: god rays fanning from the vanishing point, weighted by the mids.
• Pulse Lanes: sustained levels become piano-roll note bars along each lane.
• Phase Scope: the Lissajous figure is now three-dimensional — a third delayed tap is depth; it turns under perspective with a projection lying on the floor beneath it.
• Wrong Signal: multipath ghosting while the signal is weak.
• Signal Ridges: near terrain crests are sun-lit by slope (three shading tiers), so the mountains read as solid rock.
• Spiral Galaxy: true logarithmic arms with a fixed pattern speed (no more winding into a ring), opaque dust lanes and pink H-II knots on the arm crests.
• Hyperdrive: nebulae rushing out of the vanishing point in parallax, and a jump ring on drops.
• Galaxy 3D: the Black Hole shadow is now clean (photon ring only on escaped rays, exact disk-plane hits, debris hidden behind the shadow); Cathedral brighter.

2026-09-09 — Galaxy cinematic pipeline, support everywhere, 48 use-case pages

• Galaxy, ray-marched: a new Black Hole with real gravitational lensing (the disk wraps into an Einstein ring, Doppler beaming, jets on drops); a volumetric Nebula Cloud the camera orbits from outside; three new scenes — Supernova (a boiling star that detonates on the drop), Cathedral (an infinite signed-distance lattice where every cell is one spectrum band) and Spectrum Sea (eight band-driven wave trains, sun glitter, foam). Galaxy gains a volumetric spiral disc. 27 scenes in total.
• Cinema pass: HDR bloom plus anamorphic streaks, diffraction glints, god rays, film grain and a palette-aware grade, all driven by the music. Aurora moved its spectrum to a band texture and runs several times faster; crossfades and camera moves now use wall-clock time, so a slow GPU never lingers on the outgoing scene.
• Support, visible: a ♥ Support button in both apps’ top bars, honest copy in the welcome card and Tune panel about what contributions fund, and a /support/ page. No paywall, no watermark, ever — support pays the hosting, the phone-remote relay and new scenes.
• Discoverability: 48 use-case pages (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, YouTube, Spotify, OBS, Twitch, Mac, Windows, Chromebook, iPad, 4K, black hole, nebula, lo-fi, alternatives to Canva/VEED/Kapwing/Renderforest/Specterr/After Effects and more) with FAQ, HowTo and breadcrumb structured data; an Explore link cloud on every page; short aliases like /tiktok, /obs, /donate; sitemap and RSS regenerated; IndexNow pings on every deploy; a press & share kit.

2026-09-09 — Studio Glass redesign, 20 scenes, auto beat-sync

• New interface: one coherent design system (glass panels, pill controls, palette-driven accent that recolours with your colours), a merged transport bar with a real seek bar, a rebuilt scene picker with live previews, filters and keyboard navigation, and a calmer Tune drawer that docks beside the stage on wide screens.
• Every scene upgraded: star fields, accretion haze and lens flares (Nebula); 3D pillars, spectral envelope and Hz scale (Spectrum Bars); wireframe ribs (Waveform Tunnel); light curtains over a lake (Aurora); petal fill and halo rings (Radial); phosphor persistence and CRT bezel (Oscilloscope, Phase Scope); unlit LED bed and snare sweep (Mirror EQ); contact shadow, caustics and bubbles (Liquid BLOOB); lightning forks and field grid (Arc Storm); nebular haze and warp streaks (Hyphal Dive); lane labels and scrolling bar lines (Pulse Lanes); test card, caption and tracking tears (Wrong Signal); synthwave sun, stars and mesh (Signal Ridges); brushed steel and bench shadow (Resonance Plate); pegs, string shadows and Hz scale (String Rig); light cone and back wall (Pendulum Rack); compass rose, bezel and tempo readout (Deep Sonar).
• Two scenes return: Spiral Galaxy and Hyperdrive — 20 visuals in total.
• Beat sync v2: the visual lead now compensates for your device’s real audio output latency (wired, USB, Bluetooth) automatically, with a manual override; a live level meter and beat LED in the top bar show the lock.
• Accessibility: every toggle and file button is keyboard-operable (Enter / Space), real ARIA roles for tabs, switches and dialogs, visible focus rings, arrow-key navigation in tabs and the scene picker, screen-reader announcements for scene, recording and status changes, high-contrast mode support, and shortcuts that no longer fire while typing in a field.
• Cross-platform: icons are inline SVG (identical on Windows, Mac and phones), the drawer no longer pops open when a window crosses the phone breakpoint, and the first paint no longer flashes the control drawer. Verified in Chrome (1× and 2× displays) and Firefox.

2026-07-26 — Discoverability + stability + original scenes

• SEO landings, sitemap, robots, llms.txt, IndexNow, OG images, JSON-LD
• Cross-platform stability: fixed-step audio analysis, GPU tier boot, less quality thrash
• Galaxy originals: Pendulum, Helix, Orbital Rings, Pulse City, Chromatic Wave, Gravity Well
• From-scratch rewrites: Deep Field, Cosmic Bloom, Planet System, Black Hole
• Commercial export tooling: resolutions, branding, remote, MIDI/OSC hooks

Earlier

• BLOOB Canvas2D visualizer: beat-locked scenes, remote, MP4 path, free ethos
• Galaxy Three.js companion at /galaxy/