Afterglow

Radio and visuals for PS5. A native homebrew app with 222 free internet radio stations in 17 genres (electronic music first, plus Bollywood & Desi, Latin, K-Pop, Afrobeats and Arabic), your own songs from a USB drive, and 56 audio-reactive scenes drawn with OpenGL 4.6 that move in time with the music. The player changes its look with the genre, shows the album art of the song on air, announces every new song, keeps the songs you like, takes short commands ("play bollywood 90s", "next", "show calm scenes"), and the visuals can run themselves like a VJ.

Status: in development. Earlier builds ran on a PS5 (firmware 13.60, Relapse) and the radio plays there; this version is built and tested on a PC and not yet confirmed on a console. Title ID PPSA47770.

What is in it

• Genre skins. Every channel has its own type, colours, banner and list styling: a Teletech-style warehouse look for Techno (red ticker tape, corner brackets, glitching title), a spinning record for House, rings of light for Trance, hazard tape for Drum & Bass, LFO waves for Bass, strobing chevrons for Hard Dance, sweeping lasers for EDM, a sliced sun over a grid for Synthwave, drifting bokeh for Chill, bubbles for Pop, halftone and paint drips for Hip-Hop, silk for R&B, marigold garlands and a turning mandala for Bollywood, cut-paper flags and a blooming flower for Latin, a sea of lightsticks for K-Pop, woven kente and a talking drum for Afrobeats, an eight-point star lattice and a swinging lantern for Arabic. Moving through the channels, the whole screen changes its clothes.
• Station logos in the station list and on the now-playing cover, from Radio Browser, fetched as they come on screen and cached.
• Album art. The song title a station sends is looked up in MusicBrainz and the cover comes from the Cover Art Archive (both free and open). It is cached on the console. A record (or a CD) slides out of the cover while the music plays. Without a cover, the station gets a generated one in its genre's style.
• 56 scenes in six packs: the originals, a Trip pack of psychedelic scenes and Milkdrop-style feedback presets, a Club pack, a Gallery pack of scenes like art objects (gold-mended pottery, stained glass, paper cuts, ferrofluid, a snowflake), a Calm pack for winding down (tide pool, aurora, lanterns, rain on glass, moonlit sea, jellyfish) and a Retro pack. Paint Swirl opens the app; the best scenes come first in the list.
• Beat sync: a beat tracker measures the tempo and where the beats fall; the scenes move at the music's pace, pulses land on the beat even where a kick is buried, loops last a beat, a bar or a phrase, and Auto-VJ cuts at the end of a phrase.
• Your own music: songs on a USB drive (MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus) show up in My Music with their titles, artists, albums and embedded covers, and play one after another with the same visuals, song cards and likes.
• Commands: hold Triangle over the visuals (or type in the radio's search) and write what you want: "play bollywood 90s", "play some k-pop", "next station", "like this song", "show trippy scenes", "party mode", "sleep in 30 minutes", "turn it up". Everyday names work ("hindi", "reggaeton", "dnb", "nineties").
• Crossfade: a new station (or the next song from the drive) blends in over the one playing; Off, 2, 3 or 5 seconds.
• Song card: when a new song starts, a card shows its cover, title and artist in the genre's style (in the corner, across the middle, or off), also while the controls are hidden. Long titles shrink and wrap to fit.
• Liked songs and history: Square over the visuals likes the song on air. The radio has a Liked songs channel and a Song history of the last 50 songs; Cross on a song tunes in to its station. The liked songs are also written to liked-songs.txt in the app's storage, to read on a PC.
• Scene list: Cross opens all 56 scenes by pack; the one under the focus plays behind the list as you move. Square stars a scene, and Auto-VJ can use only your starred scenes.
• Auto-VJ picks scenes that suit the genre on air and cuts on the drop. The tempo (BPM) shows in the corner.
• Sound: a Loudness setting (+6 or +12 dB, held by a peak limiter so it does not distort), EQ presets (Flat, Bass boost, Club, Vocal) and an output meter in the settings. The music volume starts at 8 of 10 (the kit's default was far too quiet for radio).
• Station idents: a new station is announced in its genre's style.
• Settings (Options): mode, trip level, palette (including one taken from the album art), look, flashing on or off, display (Normal, Party with big type and a clock, Ambient: slow and dim), song card, Auto-VJ scenes (Genre, Favorites or Calm), beat sync, a sleep timer, volume, loudness, EQ, crossfade, sensitivity, beat rumble and resuming the last station at start.

Scenes

Pack	Scenes
Afterglow	Paint Swirl, Orb, Nebula, Ember Peak, Pulse Tunnel, Cathedral Rays, Hall of Candles, Prism
Trip	Wormhole, Mirror Maze, Kaleidoscope, Fractal Bloom, Vortex, Hypnotic, Dimension, Kaleido Melt, Acid Bloom, Echo Orb, Smoke Signals, Silk, Liquid Dream, Starfall, Neon Smear, Spiral Rings, Melting Bars
Club	Liquid Chrome, Rave Tunnel, Bubble Pop, Strobe Lasers, Scope, Classic Bars
Gallery	Stained Glass, Kintsugi, Paper Cut, Crystal Growth, Coral Labyrinth, Halftone Pop, Lissajous Loom, Origami, Ferrofluid, Ridgelines
Calm	Tide Pool, Aurora Veil, Lantern Drift, Moon Tide, Cloud Sea, Deep Sea Glow, Slow Ink, Rain on Glass, Sand Ripples, Fireflies
Retro	Skyline, Green Rain, Mode Seven, Polygon 95, Demo Plasma

Every scene follows 16 spectrum bands, the waveform, the beat and the beat clock. The feedback presets draw each frame over the last one, zoomed, turned, warped, mirrored and faded, so everything leaves trails; the trip level (D-pad up and down) sets how far they melt. Paint Swirl, Orb and Prism are ported from React Bits by David Haz (see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).

Controls

Over the visualiser:

Button	Action
Circle	Open the radio
L1 / R1	Previous / next station (or song)
L3	Play / pause
Cross	The scene list (Square stars a scene, Circle goes back)
D-pad left/right	Next or previous scene
D-pad up/down	Trip level: Calm, Normal, Melt
Square	Like the song on air (again: unlike)
L2	Next palette
R3	Auto-VJ on or off
Left stick	Steer the camera
R2	Drive: push the light up
Triangle	Hide or show the overlay (for clean recordings); hold it for the command box
Options	Settings

In the radio:

Button	Action
D-pad	Move; left and right switch between channels and stations
Cross	Play the station (next/previous then stay in that channel); on a song, tune in to its station
Square	Add to or remove from Favorites; on a song, like or unlike it
Triangle	Search by name, style, genre or country, or type a command ("play techno")
L1 / R1	Previous / next station
R2 / L2	Play-pause / stop
Options	Check every station (in the background)
R3	Show only stations that passed the check
Circle	Back to the visualiser

Radio

The radio is laid out like a satellite-radio receiver: channels on the left (Favorites, Recently played, Liked songs, Song history, All stations, My Music, then seventeen genres: Techno, House, Trance, Drum & Bass, Bass & Dubstep, Hard Dance, EDM & Dance, Synthwave, Chill & Electronica, Pop & Hits, Hip-Hop & Rap, R&B & Soul, Bollywood & Desi, Latin, K-Pop, Afrobeats, Arabic), the stations of the channel in the middle, and now playing on the right: the cover, the station, the song, the format, the time on air and the transport.

The stations are in assets/radio/stations.txt, one per line: Category | Name | Style | Country | Format | Stream address, optionally followed by | Logo address. To use your own list without rebuilding, put a stations.txt in the install folder (/data/homebrew/PPSA47770/stations.txt); it is read instead.

• Formats: MP3; AAC and AAC+ on the console (FAAD2); Ogg Vorbis (stb_vorbis) and Ogg Opus (libopus), chained streams included, with their song titles. FLAC and HLS (.m3u8) do not play yet.
• My Music: the app looks for songs on the USB drives the console mounts (/mnt/usb0 to /mnt/usb7), any folder up to six deep, at most 4,000 songs, and again whenever a drive is plugged in or taken out. MP3, AAC (.aac), Ogg and Opus play; .m4a, FLAC and WAV are not listed yet.
• Network: libcurl with OpenSSL on the console, set up the way BlackBearReloaded's console-tested apps do (src/platform/ps5/console_curl.c).
• Checking stations: Options in the radio tries every station and marks it green or red; R3 then hides the red ones. From a PC, python tools/check-stations.py --write-good good.txt does the same.
• Saved on the console: favourites, recently played, the last check, the song history, the liked songs, the visualiser's settings and the album art cache, in the app's own storage.
• Bollywood & Desi: 23 stations (Bollywood hits and classics, Punjabi, Tamil, filmi) from Radio Browser's checked list. Song titles sent in Devanagari or other Indian scripts are not drawn yet (the fonts are Latin); the song card is skipped for them.
• Latin, K-Pop, Afrobeats, Arabic: 16, 13, 14 and 12 stations from the same checked list (reggaeton, salsa and bachata; idol pop and city pop; Afrobeats, Amapiano and Afro House from Lagos, Accra and Johannesburg; Arabic pop, tarab, raï and chaabi). Song titles in Korean or Arabic script are not drawn yet either.

Stations whose terms forbid third-party players (SomaFM, for one) are left out. If a station asks to be removed, it is removed. Album art is looked up politely: at most one MusicBrainz request a second, with a User-Agent that names the app, and every answer is cached.

How it listens

The app plays its music, and the radio, through the kit's mixer. Afterglow taps the music inside the mixer (so the picture stays in time with what you hear), runs a 2048-point FFT, groups it into 16 bands spaced by pitch, normalises them automatically, smooths them like a VU meter, detects beats from jumps in the bass and drops from the bass returning after a breakdown. See src/audio/ and src/concepts/afterglow.cpp.

Build

Linux, WSL or Docker (see CLAUDE.md for the Windows Docker commands):

make                                              # PS5 app folder and ZIP in dist/
make test-unit                                    # unit tests with sanitizers
tools/host-snapshots.sh build/snapshots afterglow # PC preview pictures
HUI_WARM=30 tools/host-snapshots.sh build/snapshots afterglow  # with feedback trails grown

The home-screen backgrounds are rendered by the app itself (HUI_POSTER=pic0.png tools/host-snapshots.sh out afterglow 3840 2160) and converted with python3 tools/png-to-dds.py (BC7, as the console wants).

Copy dist/PPSA47770/ to /data/homebrew/ on the console and launch it like any other native homebrew title.

Credits and licence

Afterglow is built on ps5-homebrew-ui by BlackBearReloaded (its renderer, UI kit, mixer and background music), the PS5 Payload SDK by John Törnblom, minimp3 by lieff, stb_image by Sean Barrett, libcurl, OpenSSL and FAAD2 from PacBrew, three scenes ported from React Bits by David Haz, and the free fonts Bebas Neue, Michroma, Monoton, Bungee, Permanent Marker and Righteous. Album information comes from MusicBrainz and covers from the Cover Art Archive. GPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The kit's original README is in docs/UI-KIT-README.md.