The Drop · October 22, 2026

The six music visualizer effects, and what each one does to the frame

The menu holds seven entries and almost nobody moves it off the first one. Which means almost nobody has seen any single one of these on its own.

Photo via Unsplash

Random mix rolls again on every flash

The Flash effect dropdown opens on Random mix, and that is not a blend. Every time a flash fires the app draws one of the six names out of a hat and uses it for that flash only, then draws again from the full six on the next one.

It is a draw with replacement, so the same effect lands twice in a row about one time in six, and on average it takes around fifteen flashes before all six have turned up once. That is why the default looks busy and unplaceable: six things are taking turns faster than you can name them. The palette colour is picked the same way, as the piece on what each colour set does gets into.

Three of these are not really effects

The app builds a frame in two stages: it draws the scene onto a hidden canvas, then copies that onto the visible one. Only three of the six names do anything at the copy stage. The other three change how the scene gets drawn in the first place, which the menu hides by listing all six together.

That split explains most of the surprises. Strobe washes out a photograph because it has not landed on top of the picture, it has replaced the ground the picture was standing on. Shake cannot drag a black edge into view because the background was painted across the whole frame before anything moved.

Strobe is a colour slam, not a brightener

Strobe fills the entire frame with the flash colour, fully opaque for the first chunk of the flash and fading out across the rest. Text and shapes are then drawn in black on top, so they stop being coloured objects and become silhouettes, and an uploaded photo sits on the colour rather than in front of black.

It also has a second clock the other five do not. While the flash is live, a near opaque black fill switches on and off every 33 milliseconds, which is about fifteen light and dark swings a second on its own, before you count the flashes themselves.

So this is the loudest option in the app by a distance. The WCAG guidance is that pages should not contain anything that "flashes more than three times in any one second period, or the flash is below the general flash and red flash thresholds". Fast full frame flashing can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. If you are posting strobe content, warn people in the first frame and in the caption, and read the guide to doing it safely before you render.

Invert, which is one line of arithmetic

Invert draws the scene normally, then fills the whole frame with white using the difference blend mode. The W3C compositing spec puts it plainly: difference "subtracts the darker of the two constituent colors from the lighter color", and "painting with white inverts the backdrop color".

The fill is at full strength for roughly the first quarter of the flash and then eases back, so you get a hard snap to the negative followed by a slide home. White text goes black, a warm photo goes cold, and the palette wash in the background comes back as its opposite, which is why an orange flash can leave a blue frame.

A checkbox further down the panel, Invert all colours with the beat, uses the identical operation at a later stage. Turn both on and during the strongest part of a flash they cancel out exactly, because inverting twice gives you the original picture back.

Glitch slices cut the frame into bands

Glitch grabs horizontal strips out of the clean scene and redraws them at a sideways offset. At the peak of a flash it does eighteen of them, falling to four as the flash decays. Each strip is between 15 and 89 pixels tall, picked from anywhere down the frame, and shoved up to 160 pixels across. Eighteen strips averaging around 52 pixels is roughly 940 pixels of a 1080 pixel frame, so most rows get touched at the peak. On top it drops one band of the flash colour in difference mode, which reads as a channel tear rather than a stripe.

One detail worth having: the bass drop detector runs these same slices continuously while a drop is engaged, whichever effect you picked. So if your render glitches during the drop and you never selected glitch, that is why.

RGB split only shows up on edges

This is the most involved one and the most easily wasted. The app wipes the frame to black and rebuilds it three times, each pass multiplying the scene by pure red, green or blue to isolate that channel, since "multiplying any color with black results in black". The three are then added back with the operation the spec defines as displaying "the sum of the source image and destination image".

Here is the catch. Added back with no offset, the three channels give you the original picture exactly. The effect only exists because they are nudged apart first: red 18 pixels left, blue 18 pixels right, green moving vertically instead, about 11 pixels down. So in the middle of a flat area RGB split does nothing at all, because everything realigns and sums back to what it was. You see it only where there is an edge for the channels to come apart on, which makes it spectacular on hard display type and almost invisible on a soft dark photo.

Shake and zoom move the picture instead of processing it

These two are transforms, applied while the scene is being drawn. Shake throws the content up to 70 pixels in each direction and rotates it a couple of degrees. Zoom punch scales it up to 1.45 times with a smaller rotation. Both re-roll their random numbers on every frame, so at 60 frames a second the picture lands somewhere new every 17 milliseconds for as long as the flash lasts.

An uploaded image gets extra, because images carry their own small scale bump on every flash whatever the effect. Stack that on zoom punch and a photo peaks around 1.62 times normal while text and shapes only reach 1.45.

These two are also the only pair that get a brightness lift: the finished frame is added to itself at half strength, the same sum operation, so a mid grey near 128 lands around 192 while pure black stays pure black. And they are the cheapest things here to compress, since moving a whole frame is what a video codec is built to track, which the post on why a visualizer looks soft after upload measured.

What no effect ever touches

The frame is built in a fixed order and the effect stage finishes early in it. The vocal visualizer bars, the flying notes, the persistent flicker and the grain and scanlines layer are all drawn afterwards. So RGB split does not split the spectrum bars, shake does not move the grain, and strobe does not recolour the flying notes. If you want one steady element over a frame being thrown around, that is where it has to live.

How to actually pick one

• Photos and artwork: zoom punch or shake. They move the picture without destroying it, and they survive upload compression best.
• Hard display text: glitch slices or RGB split. Both need edges, and text is nothing but edges.
• A dark or soft source: skip RGB split, there is nothing for it to grip. Invert gives you a change you can see.
• Pure impact: strobe, with the caution above taken seriously.

The effect is read fresh on every frame, so you can change it mid preview and watch the next flash land differently. The general walkthrough of the settings panel covers the controls either side of this one.