Create audio visualisations for Youtube

Have you ever wanted to upload an audio track to Youtube, and have something visual for the listener to look at? Here's a quick and dirty way.

Use GIMP to make a .png file that's 640x240, put a picture that has something to do with the audio, your channel art, whatever. Save it as test.png.

Say your audio track is called test.m4a.

Now run:

ffmpeg -i test.png -i test.m4a -tune stillimage -filter_complex "[1:a]showfreqs=s=50x240:colors=blue[sw]; [0:v][sw]hstack[out]" -map "[out]" -map 1:a -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 18 -c:a copy output.mkv

This will give you something like:


Not exactly beautiful, but better than a blank screen.

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