A beautiful 3D music visualizer that transforms your music library into an interactive universe — artists as stars, albums as planets, tracks as moons.
Ported from the original Bloom Studio Planetary iOS app, rebuilt with modern OpenGL and cross-platform support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Pre-built binaries available for:
- Windows (64-bit)
- Linux (64-bit)
- macOS (Intel & Apple Silicon)
- Interactive 3D Universe — Navigate through your music collection as a stunning space visualization
- Audio-Reactive Effects — Stars pulse and emit solar flares synced to the music's bass and rhythm
- Rich Visual Effects
- Multi-layer nebula clouds (red and blue gas)
- Comet particles with glowing tails
- Saturn-like rings on large albums (10+ tracks)
- Orbital particles and dark matter effects
- Dynamic star coronas with artist-colored flames
- Gamepad Support — Full controller support including Steam Input
- Search — Find any artist instantly with keyboard or on-screen virtual keyboard
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| Left Click star | Fly to artist, view album planets |
| Left Click planet | View track moons |
| Left Click moon | Play track |
| Right Drag | Orbit camera |
| Scroll | Zoom in/out |
| Type | Search for artists |
| ESC | Zoom out / Exit |
| Space | Toggle auto-rotate |
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| A / Cross | Select / Play |
| B / Circle | Back / Zoom out |
| Left Stick | Pan camera |
| Right Stick | Orbit camera |
| D-Pad | Navigate albums/search |
| Triggers | Zoom in/out |
| Bumpers | Previous/Next track |
| L3 (Left Stick Click) | Recenter to now playing |
| R3 (Right Stick Click) | Toggle virtual keyboard |
| Guide/Home | Toggle auto-rotate |
- CMake 3.16+
- C++17 compiler
- SDL2
- GLEW
- GLM
- TagLib
# Install dependencies (Ubuntu/Debian)
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libsdl2-dev libglew-dev libglm-dev libtag1-dev
# Build
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
# Run
./planetary /path/to/music# Install dependencies
brew install cmake sdl2 glew glm taglib
# Build
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)
# Run
./planetary /path/to/music# Install dependencies
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 \
mingw-w64-x86_64-glew mingw-w64-x86_64-glm mingw-w64-x86_64-taglib
# Build
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..
mingw32-make -j$(nproc)sudo apt install mingw-w64
mkdir build-win && cd build-win
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/mingw-toolchain.cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)- Artists — Positioned using a golden-angle spiral with hash-based distance. Colors derived from artist name ASCII values.
- Albums — Orbit stars with Kepler-like spacing. Album art displayed as planet textures.
- Tracks — Moons orbiting albums at speeds proportional to track duration.
- Audio Analysis — Real-time RMS, bass, and treble analysis drives visual effects.
- SDL2 — Window, input, audio playback
- OpenGL 3.3 — GPU-accelerated rendering
- GLM — Vector/matrix math
- TagLib — Music metadata (ID3, FLAC, etc.)
- Dear ImGui — User interface
- miniaudio — Audio decoding and playback
- stb_image — Texture loading
Original Planetary concept and code by Bloom Studio (Robert Hodgin / flight404), Smithsonian Institution.
BSD-3-Clause — See LICENSE for details.