Kymatra
Audio visualizer for macOS
A wallpaper that listens.
Kymatra draws a live oscilloscope behind your desktop icons, moving with whatever your Mac is playing. Written in Swift and Metal, for Apple silicon.
14 days free. No account, no subscription.
A linear trace driven by low frequency content, aligned frame to frame so it holds still instead of skating across the screen.
Built for the machine it runs on
It gets out of the way.
A wallpaper runs all day, behind everything else you are doing. Kymatra is built so you never have a reason to quit it.
- Memory, active
- 146 MB71.6 MB while nothing is playing
- CPU, active
- 8–12%0.4% while nothing is playing
- Frame rate
- 120 fpsDrops to zero when the room is quiet
- Audio passthrough
- UntouchedThe tap never alters what you hear
Measured on a 3024 × 1964 built-in display driving a single screen. When audio stops, Kymatra stops issuing draw calls altogether rather than drawing a flat line over and over.
Five ways to draw it
Pick a shape, then tune it.
Every mode keeps its own settings, so tuning the bars never disturbs the trace you spent an evening getting right.
Linear and mirrored
The waveform itself, drawn edge to edge, or reflected about its centre line. Correlation alignment holds the trace steady between frames.
Polar and radial
The same signal wrapped into a ring, either as a time domain trace or as a closed band of low frequencies deflecting around the circle.
Bars
Discrete frequency bars from 30 Hz to 16 kHz, mirrored about the centre, with smoothing measured in points rather than in bins.
Colour
It takes its colours from your desktop.
So the trace belongs to the picture behind it rather than sitting on top of one.
Read from the wallpaper
Kymatra counts the colours actually on your screen and offers you what it finds. It crops to what your display shows, and picks the right image out of a dynamic wallpaper rather than whichever one happens to be first.
Solid or cycling
One tint, or a list of colours walked through over time. Tints are only partly saturated on purpose: a fully saturated colour carries far less light than white and goes muddy against a dark desktop.
Gradients
A list laid across the trace, reversible, and able to travel along it. A moving gradient wraps and a still one does not, so a sliding ramp never drags a hard seam across the screen.
Privacy
It never connects to anything.
Kymatra can hear everything your Mac plays. That is the whole point of it, and it is also the reason it has no network code in it at all.
There is no analytics, no account, no update check, and no licence server. Your licence is verified on your own machine, by arithmetic, with nothing sent anywhere. Nothing about what you listen to leaves your computer, because there is nothing in the app that could send it.
Pricing
Buy it once.
- 14 days free, with every mode unlocked
- No subscription and no account
- One licence covers every Mac you own
- macOS 26.5 or later, Apple silicon
- Support from a person, at [email protected]
Since a licence covers every Mac you own, checkout sells them one at a time. If you want several, for a team or as a gift, email [email protected] rather than buying the same thing over and over.