Kymatra

Your music, behind your icons.

A free music visualizer that lives in your wallpaper. It draws whatever your computer is playing under your desktop icons. Try it: open the sample, or drop a song on the desktop below.

Kymatra runs on a Mac or a PC. Send yourself the link for later:

Email it to me
Download for Mac Download for Windows

macOS 26.0 or later on Apple silicon, Windows 10 22H2 or Windows 11.

Open sample.m4a, or drop a song anywhere here.

Color

A few of the real settings. The app has the rest, and a tutorial that shows you them one at a time.

Why I made it

I paid $25 for a music-reactive live wallpaper app, and on my Mac it took around 3 GB of memory just to animate the desktop. A wallpaper runs all day behind everything else, so it should be the lightest thing on the computer, not the heaviest. So I made one that is, and made it free.

Kymatra uses about 150 MB while music plays. When nothing is playing, or a window covers the desktop, it stops drawing completely. What you hear passes through untouched, and nothing leaves your computer but a song's name, and only when you ask it to find lyrics.

Ian

The $25 app 3 GB
Kymatra 150 MB
Memory to animate the desktop, drawn to scale.

What it does.

On your desktop

Behind your icons

Kymatra draws on the wallpaper itself, under the icons, not in a window over them. Nothing covers your work.

Eight shapes

A line, the same line mirrored, a ring that bends with the wave, a ring of bass, bars, dots, a Lissajous figure and a kaleidoscope. Each keeps its own settings.

Put it anywhere

Press Place and your wallpaper comes up full screen. Drag the box where you want it, pull its corners to size it, turn it with the handle.

Lay it on the picture

Hold CommandCtrl and drag each corner onto a surface in the picture, and it lies there in perspective, like bars along the wing of a car.

Light the picture itself

A highlight brightens part of your wallpaper with the beat, like a character's eyes, instead of drawing over it. It is set like a visualizer: where it sits, its shape, its color, and which part of the music it follows.

Colors from your wallpaper

Match wallpaper offers the colors actually in your picture. Pick one, or several for a gradient that runs along the trace.

New in 1.6 Everything new

The song, in words

The title and artist of whatever is playing, in any font you have, arriving word by word or rippling on each kick. Or the line of the lyrics being sung, once you turn Lyrics online on.

Pictures, and the cover

A still picture or an animated GIF, PNG or WebP beside the visualizers, playing with the music's loudness. Or the cover of whatever is playing, changing with each song.

Record a clip

The next ten seconds of what Kymatra draws over your wallpaper, with its sound, saved as a video on your Desktop, wide or tall for a phone.

Out of the way

A small window

When windows cover the desktop, a small window keeps the trace in view. Open it from the menu bar or with ⌥⌘M. It snaps to the edges of the screen and to the notch.Open it from the tray or with Alt+Shift+M. It snaps to the edges of the screen.

Full screen

From ⌥⌘KCtrl+Alt+K, or after the computer sits idle a while: a screen saver that hears what's playing.

Easy to start

Settings opens one step at a time, each saying what its controls do, so the first five minutes are never a wall of sliders.

Eight shapes, any picture.

A line, a mirrored line, two rings, bars, dots, a Lissajous figure and a kaleidoscope, in any color, or in colors it reads from your wallpaper.

  • A thin glowing waveform running across a night sky above a rising moon.
  • A night desert wallpaper, with the trace drawn in the violet and amber of its sky.
  • A glowing ring bending around the moon.
  • Place: a highlight's handles on an eye, its shape settings open beside it.
  • An illustrated face whose eye glows with the music.
  • A redwood forest wallpaper, with the trace drawn in the green and gold of its light.
  • Blue frequency bars rising across the sky above the moon.
  • Red bars standing along the rear wing of a black sports car.
  • A Windows desktop sent in by a user: orange bars across NASA's visualization of a black hole, its glowing disk bent around the dark center.Wallpaper: NASA Goddard / J. Schnittman
  • Kymatra full screen over a desktop picture.
  • Bars across a moonlit desktop, behind the folder icons.

It's free.

Every feature, every update, on as many computers as you like. There's no account and nothing to unlock. If you like it, you can leave a tip, and if something's wrong, tell me on Discord or at [email protected].

Download Kymatra