Monkey Hi Hat displays colorful, interesting graphics, many of which are audio-reactive -- they move and change in time with whatever music is being played through your PC's speaker outputs.

• 2025-DEC-07 Install or Update to v5.2.0
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• New: Full Linux support
• New: DJ / VJ features (line-in / mic support, send / receive via Spout or NDI)
• New: Faster dedicated install archive download via MonkeyHiHat.com
• More visualizers, effects, and crossfades!

As of the latest release, there are around 4,000 combinations of visualizations and effects, plus 17 transition (crossfade) effects! Great for DJs, parties and other events!

Playlists and many of the visualizations are customizable. The program and all content is 100% free. It's very stable and trouble-free, I have let it run 24 hours with no crashes or memory leaks.

I encourage shader programmers to contribute new visualizations; see Creating Visualizations in the wiki. If you're a .NET programmer and want to work on bugs or features, see Contributor's Getting Started in the wiki.

See thumbnails like the one below in the Volt's Laboratory wiki:

Download and run the installer from the release page, then read the documentation home page for a quick step-by-step first-run walk-through. The docs range from basic usage to advanced customization.

Please understand there is no "user interface" -- the program is designed to run full screen, and to be controlled from another PC or Android device. Remote control is optimal but not mandatory, see the Related Material section at the end of this page for details. The general idea is to get it running and let it do its thing.

This should run on almost any Windows or Linux PC with a decent NVIDIA or AMD graphics card and practically any type of audio playback. (For Linux I can only test against Debian 13 and KDE using X11.)

CPU and memory requirements are minimal, 99% of the work is on the graphics card. If your PC can run this Shadertoy example full-screen, which is a Monkey Hi Hat visualization with effects that I back-ported, you should be able to run Monkey Hi Hat just fine. No third-party drivers are required (earlier versions did require one). Overhead is so low, on my desktop PC I often run the program on a second monitor while I do other work. As of version 4.4 on Windows, it only uses around 110 MB at runtime.

The music reactivity responds to anything your PC is playing from any source, whether that is Spotify, Soundcloud, Pandora, an external device connected to the line-in or surround-sound jacks, MP3s, YouTube, etc. If you can hear it from your speakers, the program can "hear" it too. For on-screen track info, Linux supports any DBus-compliant media player, but currently only the native Windows Spotify client is supported (WMC is coming soon, at which point most major media players will be supported).

IMPORTANT: Turn Up The Volume!

Since the app (in loopback/monitor mode) "hears" everything your computer outputs, meaning it is processing the final mixed results of all possible inputs, the playback volume is also "heard" by the program. If your master volume level is at 50%, the "strength" of the audio signals passed to visualizers will only be half as strong as if your volume level is at 100%. My preference and recommendation is to use an external amplifier to control the volume, and leave your computer set to 100%. All of the content I provide was written / adapted / tested this way. (On Windows, line-in / mic audio is not normally volume-sensitive.)

(Warning: Some people say these videos are pretty loud on some mobile devices. Sorry about that.)

New! A 2-minute look at version 4.4.0 -- text overlays, crossfade transition effects, video file support, and new visualizers and effects! These very small videos still have compression artifacts due to Github's file-size limit, but they will give you a good idea of what's possible. The real thing looks about a million times better (especially on a high-quality screen like big 4K OLED).

Here's a quick look at some of the version 3 post-processing effects released around the end of 2023.

This is from version 2 released in the summer of 2023, which only had basic visualizations.

In my living room setup where we watch this most often, the computer running Monkey Hi Hat is meant to be hidden from view like all the other AV equipment, so remote control was an essential feature. There are four options:

• Recommended: install the convenient Monkey Droid GUI

  • Windows installer

  • Android APK package

  • See the documentation Quick Start for usage instructions

• Command-line control is via SSH terminal connections from another device. See the documentation Quick Start for details about setting up and using SSH. My systems are configured for this, but frankly Monkey Droid is so much easier to use, I never actually connect via SSH any more.

• Old school: a wireless keyboard with integrated trackball or other pointer control, which is obviously handy for more than just controlling this program. The program responds to quite a few useful keystrokes. As usual, please refer to the documentation, but my keyboard is hidden off to the side of the couch, and I most commonly use just four keyboard commands that I can readily find by touch:

  • Right Arrow to skip to the next visualization
  • Down Arrow to add an FX to the current visualizer
  • W (for WHAT?) to show the names of the current vizualizer / FX
  • T to show the name of the Spotify track being played

• Although remote control is the intended usage, control from the same PC is certainly possible. Configure the program to launch in a window, start another console window to issue commands, get it showing the content you want (such as a playlist), then either issue the --fullscreen command or focus on the window and hit the spacebar. This is how the documentation's first-time walk-through works.

I have been asked about music reactivity for DJ usage. The program supports line-in and mic-in, or any other type of input. If you have a pre-determined music set, you can create a playlist with manual advance (Switch mode External), and simply use the right-arrow to load the next viz/FX combo manually. A playlist can even specify the crossfade transitions.

Content creators should check out my Jan-2024 blog article Getting Started Tutorial. Note the article refers to the v3 install script; as of version 4 released Feb-2024, the installer is a stand-alone program that is much easier to use, and the program itself no longer requires third-party drivers and all the associated configuration hassles.

The automatically-installed shaders, playlists, effects, crossfades, accompanying configuration files, icons, graphical textures and videos, and the origin of all these oddball names can be found in my Volt's Laboratory repository.

• The NVIDIA GTX 1070 series may crash when switching to full-screen mode
• NVIDIA drivers on Linux may require X11 (known driver bug displaying textures)