WaveBG quietly turns the audio playing on your Mac into a living wallpaper — fourteen visualizers, built for Apple Silicon, designed to feel anything but 2002.
Each is tuned for the wallpaper context — readable behind your icons, energy-light when audio is quiet, never frantic.
Frequency bars with rounded caps, soft halos, and an idle breath when audio is quiet.
Layered ribbons drifting across the bottom of the screen — oceanic, ambient.
Soft metaball blooms anchored bottom-center. Bass drives the main, mids drive the satellites.
Vertical curtains of soft color drifting like northern lights.
Sparse stars that drift and shimmer in response to the high end of your mix.
Domain-warped fluid flow. Bold, bass-driven, deliberately not literal flames.
The classic plasma effect, redrawn with a 2026 palette and modern warping.
Underwater light patterns that ripple at the pace of the bass.
Cellular tessellation drifting at the pace of the song.
Turing-pattern spots and stripes that breathe with the music — never the same twice.
Chladni-style standing waves that resolve to whatever frequencies you're playing.
Particles flowing through a curl-noise vector field, leaving fading trails.
Ink puffs spawn on bass beats and disperse in slow motion across the screen.
Stereo phase scope — left versus right plotted in real time. Mesmerizing on well-mixed music.
A wallpaper runs 24/7. WaveBG is built so you don't notice the cost.
Metal shaders. vDSP FFT. Low energy by default. Pauses on Low Power Mode automatically.
When no audio has played for a few seconds, WaveBG fades to nothing and stops rendering.
No Dock icon. Settings, visualizer switching, and pause are one click away. Out of your face.
Mirror across every screen, or pick a different visualizer per display.
WaveBG reads your system audio output through Apple's dedicated Audio Recording permission, computes a frequency spectrum in memory, and discards the buffers as soon as the next frame is drawn. Nothing is recorded, saved, or transmitted. Ever.
One-time purchase. No subscription. No nonsense.
If you have a question that isn't here, drop us a line.
Just the Audio Recording permission, in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Audio Recording. WaveBG uses Apple's Core Audio Process Taps API — built specifically for capturing system audio output — so it doesn't request screen recording, microphone, or any other access. Audio is processed in memory for visualization and discarded immediately.
macOS 14.4 Sonoma and later. The Core Audio Process Taps API used for audio capture requires 14.4+ for sandboxed apps. Apple Silicon Macs get the best performance and energy profile; Intel Macs are supported but default to 30 fps.
Yes. It visualizes whatever audio your Mac is playing, regardless of the source.
Not at v1, but a plugin system is on the roadmap.
No, WaveBG is a commercial product. Its design and engineering documentation are public; the implementation is not.
One email when WaveBG hits the Mac App Store. No newsletter, no marketing follow-ups.