A free TouchDesigner alternative for audio-reactive visuals?

If you make audio-reactive visuals, you have probably met TouchDesigner. It is powerful, mature and has a large community. It is also a visual tool first: sound comes in through operators, and a full music setup usually means a second program next to it.

Infinite starts from the other side. It is a DAW and a visual tool on one canvas, free and open source. This page is a practical comparison, including the places where TouchDesigner is the better pick.

What Infinite does well for this job

• Audio and visuals share a canvas. Synths, sequencers and plugins sit next to shaders and 3D, wired with cables. There is no OSC bridge to set up.
• Audio analysis is a node. Audio Analyze gives an 8-band FFT and onset detection that you can wire to any control.
• It hosts plugins. AU (macOS) and VST3 (macOS, Windows, Linux) plugins load into the graph, and their parameters can be modulated by visuals.
• It is free and open source. No licence tier, and the source is on GitHub.
• Video out to other tools. Syphon (macOS), Spout (Windows) and NDI carry the picture to a projector tool or a streaming setup.

Where TouchDesigner is stronger

• It has been around for years, so the amount of tutorials, forum answers and shared networks is far larger.
• Python scripting and a deep set of operators cover installations and data work that Infinite does not aim at.
• Many venues and teams already have TouchDesigner in their pipeline.

If your show depends on that ecosystem, stay there. If you want sound and picture designed together, with a synth and a shader in the same patch, Infinite is worth an afternoon.

A quick way to judge it

1. Download Infinite for your platform.
2. Open the Moves with the music template from the Library.
3. Press play, then replace the shape with something of your own.

For numbers, the site has a benchmarks page that states its method and its limits.

Bringing a shader over

If you already write GLSL, the Field Pixel node accepts a per-pixel kernel and compiles it for the GPU. Audio values arrive as ordinary inputs, so a shader that reacts to sound is a few lines. The Field language post explains how it works.

---

Originally published at https://infinitedevices.org/blog/free-touchdesigner-alternative-for-audio-reactive-visuals.html. Infinite is a free, open-source DAW for visuals, music and code: infinitedevices.org.