"Une cause très petite, qui nous échappe,
 détermine un effet considérable que nous
 ne pouvons pas ne pas voir, et alors nous
 disons que cet effet est du au hasard."

-- Henri Poincaré, 1908

Welcome

What is Le Biniou ?

Le Biniou is a program which creates images from sound, in an intelligent way. It has a long history and has been inspired by many OpenSource projects.

Le Biniou comes with numerous plugins/effects, and

   WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Designed to run stand-alone (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, ... inputs are supported), it can also be integrated in your favorite Media player. For now, XMMS, Audacious, and XBMC are supported.

Since nowadays machines come with N cores, I started a project called erlBiniou, which shows how to run N instances as OpenGL texture servers. The server is written in Erlang.

Architecture

Le Biniou is made of about 100 plugins, that react to an input source (usually, a soundcard), and renders images to output plugins (screen, disk dump, Erlang port, ...)

It is based on a library (libbiniou.so), that helps you write plugins in an easy way, and on a main program called "Biniou". Other examples of using the library are provided, like the classical "Hello world", the use of the library's neural network code, or how to use le Biniou in an OpenGL context.

After more than ten years of existence, and countless hours of run, it creates new, never seen before, mind-blowing images. And you'll be pleased by the choices of its AI :)

Attention Windows users: Le Biniou is *NOT* a Winamp plugin, nor will it ever be ported to your so-called Operating System. That's a philosophical design choice :)

Random notes

About the code: It was a deliberate choice to keep things as simple as possible. Thus, Le Biniou works on 8bits-indexed buffers, which allows to easily develop cellular-automatons, or similar algorithms. No OpenGL. No MMX/SSE2/assembly optimizations. No GPU programming.

Only simple plugins. Think multi-agents or distributed AI. The magic of mixing plugins in a chaotic way, based on a perceptible input, does the rest.

Features

• Fractint colormaps
• PNG/PPM/PGM image loading
• FFT computations using FFTW
• Colormaps and pictures faders
• An API to create oscilloscope-like effects
• Particle system
• On Screen Display
• Embedded feed-forward back-propagation neural network
• and more...

WARNING: We are not responsible for the side-effects of using Le Biniou. But we hope you will have some fun playing with it :)