Docs / Advanced

Visualizers & fullscreen

Seven Metal-shader effects fed by a live FFT of the playing audio, with beat detection — not a canned loop.

The seven effects

Pick one in View → Effect, or from the strip that appears when you hover the visualizer:

Effect	What you see
SPECTRUM	Classic frequency bars, low to high.
WATER	A liquid surface rippling with the music.
FLAMES	Fire that flares on the beat.
BUBBLES	A lava lamp: wax that rises, joins and parts with the music.
PLASMA	Folded colour fields that churn with the beat.
WARP	A starfield that accelerates with energy.
AURORA	Northern-lights bands over a dark sky.

All seven effects — click a name to switch. These are recordings of the app itself, at the settings it ships with, answering real music.

Switching effects

View → Effect lists all seven, with the current one ticked.
Or move the pointer over the visualizer. A strip fades in along the bottom — ◀ NAME ▶ — and steps through them without going near the menu bar. It fades out again when you leave.
Changing skin changes the effect too — each one opens on the effect it is built around; see the lineup. Pick a different effect afterwards and it stays until the next time you change skin, and it is the one that comes back when you relaunch.
Not in the mood for any of them? ⌘E, or View → Effect → Hide, puts the whole area away and the window shrinks by exactly that much — a compact player with a display, a transport and nothing moving. The same key brings it back at the height it was.

Two you can put your hand in

Most of the effects only answer the music. Two also answer you:

BUBBLES — press on a blob of wax and drag it. The lamp keeps running underneath, so the one you are holding joins, parts and pushes its neighbours exactly as it would have on its own. Let go mid-flick and it keeps going.
WATER — click anywhere to drop a stone. The ring it makes goes into the same surface as the rain and the beats, so what happens next is the water rather than an animation.

Fullscreen screensaver mode

Press ⌘F (or the ⛶ button, or View → Effect → Fullscreen) and the visualizer takes the whole screen while the music keeps playing.
esc brings you back — or a click anywhere. Every other key is left alone and goes on working, so reaching for pause does not throw you out of full screen.
Over WATER a single click is a stone rather than the way out, so there it is esc or a double click. Over BUBBLES a click that catches no wax still leaves.
Effect and skin choices carry over — pick them before going big.
Album art can ride along or stay behind — see Hide Art in Fullscreen under Album art.

Party trick: fullscreen WARP on a TV over AirPlay turns the living room into 1999.

For winding down: WATER, AURORA, PLASMA and BUBBLES are the slow ones. Put on something quiet, send one of them to the whole display, and the screen stops being a desktop — no timers, no counters, nothing to tap. Any key ends it.