Praxis / Praxis LIVE

Praxis LIVE running Magoria and an audio example concurrently.
Praxis LIVE running Magoria and an audio example concurrently.
Older view of Praxis LIVE showing live compiled particle graph over webcam image
Older view of Praxis LIVE showing live compiled particle graph over webcam image

Praxis is a Java-based modular framework for live creative play with video, images, audio, and other media. Its primary focus is on the easy development of generative and interactive media installations, as well as live performance. Praxis LIVE is a graphical, patcher-style interface for developing Praxis projects 'on the fly'. It is partly inspired by projects such as AudioMulch, Bidule and Isadora, and to a lesser extent Pure Data and Processing; however, it is not intended to be a clone of any of them.

Praxis and Praxis LIVE are released under the GPLv3 licence, and can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/praxis/

Primary Features

  • Media neutral architecture. Praxis is built around a simple but robust asynchronous message-passing system, allowing different media (and the system) to communicate with each other without interfering with each other's processing.
  • Intuitive patcher-style graphical editor. Drag and drop components from the palette on to the patch window; draw in audio, video and control connections; edit properties in the property window.
  • Edit everything live. Praxis and Praxis LIVE are built around the central concept that everything should be editable at run time.
  • Background loading of all resources. Load images, samples, etc without interrupting playback.
  • Optimized, software graphics pipeline, including a range of pixel effects and blend modes. (A hardware-accelerated OpenGL version of this pipeline is partially complete).
  • Video input and playback using bindings to the GStreamer library. You must have GStreamer installed on your system for this to work. (Other video libraries may be supported in the future).
  • Low latency audio support through JavaSound and JACK.
  • Custom GUI's and MIDI control. Create custom controls panels bound to any parameter, or control any parameter using a MIDI controller.

And finally ...

  • Live Java coding. Praxis comes with a small but growing range of built in components, but for those times when the built in stuff doesn't do what you want you can enter fragments of Java code, compiled and added to the graph while your project is running. The video code component provides a subset of the Processing (2D) API ported to the Praxis graphics pipeline, along with some additional features such as access to blend modes and animatable parameters.