Image: Opera
It won’t whip the llama’s ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser.
Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera’s Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It’s essentially a shader, which uses your PC’s graphics engine to generate the moving background.
The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said.
Opera’s Sonic theme (which has nothing to do with the Sega game and/or the accompanying cartoon and movie franchise) takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.
“With the Sonic Theme, the browser captures audio from the sidebar and converts it into a power spectrum texture, where one axis represents frequency and the other represents time,” Opera said in a blog post. “This texture is passed to the shader, where each pixel samples the current audio intensity using its screen position and animation-driven coordinates. The shader applies a frequency compensation curve to balance the spectrum and outputs an amplitude value that drives animation, color, and other visual effects in sync with the music. So if that all sounds complicated, just remember that whatever you’re seeing on the screen is completely unique to what you’re listening to.”
Sonic is an interesting touch. As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played. Winamp quietly returned in 2022, then received another update in 2023.
Is Opera’s Sonic as good as Winamp? At this point, I wouldn’t say so. But Opera has far more resources than the small Winamp team does. And who knows? Further iterations could make this something special.
Opera One is free and separate from the company’s Opera Neon AI browser and the Opera GX browser for gamers, each of which come with their own unique features.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.
