PulseCanvas Studio is a music player and visualizer with a video exporter, and I built it for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro. It's free, and there's no account.
The catalog went from 31 designs to 336 in about a week. Along the way, 285 music visualizers passed my test suite. No two rendered alike, and every one of them moved with the music. My AI agents built them. Then I went through all 285 and threw out 104.
What it is
PulseCanvas Studio is for musicians and DJs who need something to put on screen with their sound. Bring a song and pick from 336 native Metal visualizers. Studio detects a beat grid, so you arrange scenes in bars instead of seconds: four bars of Magma Tube, then one bar of Mirrorball Tunnel. Export an MP4 with your soundtrack at up to 4K and 60 fps, or hit Present and run it full screen. Your GPU does the rendering and your music stays on your device.
If you'd rather just watch, Radio plays stations of songs with beat-aligned visuals.
Directing the catalog
The agents wrote the shaders behind that jump. The direction was mine, and it was blunt.
The first instruction was subtraction. Anything that was a copy had to go, including some of the original 31. Then I asked for 100 more: "more vibrant and dynamic tunnels and driving and dancing visuals." That batch came back with robots and tube men. My note was "the dancing people might be a little cheesy," and 17 literal concepts got replaced with abstract ones.
The note I cared about most was about the audio wiring, "so the sound actually moves the visuals. That's the whole idea."
What the tests caught
Agents do well against a target you can measure, so we measured what we could.
One test rendered every design and compared all 40,470 pairs, so nothing shipped that looked identical to something else at the pixel level. Another measured how much of the picture reacts to the music. The 27 weakest designs started at a median of 6%, which is a screensaver with a slight twitch. The agents got them to 54.3%, and nothing in the 285 ended below 12%. A separate check compared structure and caught two designs, Neon Needle and Violet Velocity, that were the same radial web tunnel. One got retired.
I'd build those tests again for any agent-made catalog. Without them I'd have spent my review time on visuals that ignored the song.
What they couldn't catch
Every design got a generated 12-second review video over the same music excerpt, 57 minutes of footage in all. I watched them in Finder with Quick Look and gave the keepers a red label. That label was my whole review interface.
My agent handled the rest. When I said a review was done, it read the Finder labels straight off the video files and used them as the trigger. A red label meant the design stayed. No label meant it was withdrawn. It didn't prune anything while I was still rating. 181 made it.
A rejection wasn't always a flat no. Some designs were close and just needed adjusting, and on those I steered the agent instead of cutting them.
The numbers by batch are the part I keep thinking about. Of the 87 designs from before the expansion, I kept 42. Of the 100 tunnels, driving and dancing designs, I kept 44. That batch had 33 driving scenes and exactly one survived, Neon Trails. All 33 had passed. Then the next 98 came through at 95, and a later batch of 60 came through at 59. Either the agents had learned what I wanted or I'd gotten tired, and I can't tell you which.
Taste also overruled the tooling. Saffron Spindle and Golden Gyre had already been retired in the duplicate pass. I tagged them red and they went back in.
Cutting has a catch when people have saved work. Every design keeps a permanent ID, and a cut design's ID stays reserved and points at one still on offer, so an old project still opens. The count reached 336 with second versions of some designs and 66 Coaster variants of the tunnels, picked the same way.
Code was the cheap part. What cost me something was throwing away 104 working visualizers I could have shipped. A test can tell you a design responds to the music. It can't tell you the design is a tube man. No agent was going to make those calls for me, and I don't want one to.
If you're running agents on anything people will look at, budget for the looking.
Two Mac editions
There are two Mac editions for a licensing reason. projectM, the engine that plays classic MilkDrop presets, is LGPL, and its own licensing page says that code can't ship through Apple's stores. So the App Store version is native only, which is why the native catalog had to stand on its own. The free Creators Edition on my site adds 7,000+ community effects from the Cream of the Crop collection curated by ISOSCELES.
What it costs
Nothing. The site puts it this way: "Every video. Every export. Free." There's an optional tip, and it unlocks nothing. The source is on GitHub under a source-available license, so redistribution is noncommercial.
Try it
Drop a track in and see what comes back. If you find a cheesy one in the 336, tell me which. I'd like to know what I missed.
More at pulsecanvas.si.