I was inspired by Dean Iverson’s tweet with a audio equalizer in JavaFX:

#JavaFX rocks. Literally. An example from our upcoming Pro JavaFX 2 book: pic.twitter.com/tSI4Vry4
and the equalizer view from that Pro JavaFX 2 example app: pic.twitter.com/T6jxvrf9
. updated pic.twitter.com/FqzgVimG

So wanted to have a go at doing one my self, so little while later I have a design and built a working application. Demo video after the break.

The Design

I started the design with a free Photoshop file from Diego Monzon:

You will see that some of it like the cool VU meters made it direct though to my design but then I played around with the other parts. I have added a link to the Photoshop file I created so you can see what I have done if you are intrested. From the photoshop file I produced a few PNG files which are used in the application, you can see them in the src images directory. I found a free LCD dot matrix font from dafont which is what I am using for the text on the screen. You can see in the code how this is loaded in JavaFX.

Download the Photoshop File 18Mb

The Code

The application did not take that long to build, guess about a day in total and about 800 lines of code. I think it is fully working other than the balance is a little fiddly with the mouse. All the control customizations should have full keyboard navigation :-) . It is mostly standard UI Controls just styled with Images and CSS. The round knobs like balance and volume I had to do something special for and created a knob skin for the Slider control. There was a bunch of the standard logic to load and parse M3U and XML playlists, a very simple data model object PlayList which just contains a url which it was loaded from and a observable list of Pairs, each Pair being a name for the song and a url to the song. We did not have all the low level media API I needed for the VU meters but as they are only really for show I made of some data from what we can get from AudioSpectrumListener.

Download the source and Netbeans Project 1.5Mb

Hope you enjoy playing with this fun little app as much as I did creating it. Hope it goes to show that you can create pretty much any UI that you can imagine in JavaFX 2.0 and even use standard controls so you maintain keyboard navigation, accessibility etc.