Apex VJ – stunning visuals to your favourite music and all in a browser

As someone with more than a passing interest in digital DJing, I must admit that I was thrilled to discover this particular new service. The brainchild of Simo Santavirta, a coder from Finland, Apex VJ has been out for about six months now and has clocked up something like a million and a half views. The service has echoes of Winamp plugins and, if we were to step further back in time, the old demo scene on yesterday’s home computers.

Ideal for running at parties, gigs or in clubs, ApexVJ creates a realtime visualiation of music. You can either have it play the 50 most popular Soundcloud tracks, an MP3 from your hard drive or simply react to sound from the microphone input. Flick to fullscreen mode with the F key and you can enjoy some immersive, inventive and fun visuals at accompany whatever sort of music you’re into – although all things being equal, it probably works better with dubstep than folk music.

At the moment Apex VJ has about 10 different visualisations which can be set to rotate randomly or triggered by you via keyboard. One of the neatest features of the (free) service is the ability to control the visuals remotely via your iPhone (no app required). You can also use direct URLs to Soundcloud with ApexVJ visuals – like this.