The pictures we've included are certainly interesting to look at, but if a picture is worth a thousand words in the case of music visualizers, a video is worth even more.

The Geiss plugin was downloaded by millions of Winamp fans and proved to be so popular that Nullsoft, the company behind Winamp, hired Ryan to write even more music visualizer plugins, including a much more powerful followup to Geiss called Milkdrop. We can say with confidence quite a few people-author included-listened to a lot of techno in the early 2000s with that as a visual backdrop.

The liquid metal flow and waveform overlay, seen in the screenshot above, was among the various modes Geiss would play in and readily identifiable to fans of the plugin. That same year programmer Ryan Geiss created the eponymous Geiss plugin for Winamp.