Kymatra

Updates

What changed, and when.

Kymatra has no update check and makes no connections of its own, so this page is how you find out there is a new version. The download page always serves the newest one.

Kymatra 1.3

2026-09-17

  • Add highlights: a shape on the wallpaper that brightens with the music rather than deforming with it, for a picture with eyes, a lamp or a word you want lit. Up to sixteen, each with its own band, color, brightness and softness, and each aimed at the picture rather than the screen so it lands on the same feature on any display. The light lands where the picture is already bright, so an eye glows and the eyelid does not.
  • Shape a highlight by hand: Ellipse, Polygon, Line and Point to start from, then drag any point in Place, right-click a point to make it a corner or smooth, and right-click the curve to add one. Corners rounds a polygon or squares a line's ends, Curve sets how much a smooth point rounds.
  • Group highlights. A group is one entry in the strip that opens into its members, and in Place it has a box of its own that moves, scales and turns every member together while each keeps its own settings.
  • Add Place: press it in Settings and the wallpaper comes up full screen with a handle on every visualizer and highlight, to be dragged, resized and turned where you want it. The rows follow the drag and a typed value moves the handle.
  • A highlight belongs to the wallpaper it was placed on. Change the desktop picture and it is kept, marked in the list, and not drawn until that wallpaper is back, so one set of highlights per picture needs nothing set up. The layer menu moves one to the current wallpaper or shows it on every wallpaper.
  • Add an Order section, the whole wallpaper in draw order across visualizers and highlights, with a swap button between each neighbouring pair.
  • Give every visualizer an outline: a second color source drawn as a band inside the shape's edge, with its own style, palette and thickness, and Transparent as a fourth color style so a fill can be hollow or an outline off.
  • Add Flip: mirror a visualizer left to right, top to bottom or both about its own centre, at any rotation.
  • Split the panel into sections, Visualizers, Highlights, Images, Order, General and About, with Placement and Shape as separate tabs. Images holds a place for animated pictures, which are next.
  • Say what a saved configuration would replace, by name and by kind, so saving over one is a decision rather than a formality.
  • Fix a color edit that only landed once something else redrew, and a color popup that read White after switching tabs while the wallpaper drew the stored color.

Kymatra 1.2.1

2026-09-02

  • Stop the wallpaper's background painting over the small window. With Background set to a solid color, the small window drew that color across itself and its own Solid, Glass or Transparent setting did nothing.
  • Show the ground that belongs to what you are editing. Selecting the small visualizer offered the wallpaper's background and dim, which cannot act on it; its own background and color now sit there instead, under Color rather than General.
  • Rename Glass background to Settings window, that being the window it applies to rather than anything a visualizer is drawn on.
  • Apply the wallpaper dim to a display plugged in after it was set, which previously drew undimmed until the slider was touched again.

Kymatra 1.2

2026-09-02

  • Show a small visualizer that stays above your other windows, from the menu bar or ⌥⌘M. Drag it anywhere, resize it from its edges, and it settles against the screen edges, the menu bar and the notch.
  • It draws a visualizer of its own rather than a copy of the wallpaper, seeded from one already there, so its color and response come across and its position and size are its own.
  • Give the small window its own background: a solid color you can match to your desktop picture, the glass macOS uses for floating panels, or transparent.
  • Merge it with the notch. On a display without one it takes the same place in the middle of the menu bar.
  • Stop drawing the wallpaper while something covers it. With a window over it the visualizer now costs no frames and about 74 MB less, and comes back about a second after you can see the desktop again.
  • Show the visualizer on its own, above the menu bar and the Dock, from the menu bar or ⌥⌘K. Your wallpaper stays behind it, and Escape, any key or a click leaves.
  • Choose the shortcut for it, under Screen saver. Delete turns it off.
  • Start the full screen visualizer on its own after a set time with no keyboard or mouse. Off by default, and it does not start while nothing is playing.
  • Keep the display awake while the full screen visualizer is up.
  • Lock the Mac when leaving the full screen visualizer, off by default, so it can be left up while you are away.
  • Put back a visualizer you did not mean to remove, from the visualizer menu. Removing one no longer throws away how it was tuned.
  • Stop the Polar ring crossing over itself when Reach was set past Circle size. Its Reach now starts at a value that cannot invert the ring.
  • Mirror the color gradient around the Polar ring.
  • Load a configuration's visualizers, not just its settings. Loading a two visualizer configuration over three now gives you two.
  • Bring a configuration's colors back with it. Changing palette and then loading a configuration no longer left the colors behind.
  • Load a configuration exactly as it was saved. A setting changed afterwards no longer survives loading it back.
  • Open every visualizer in the mode it was left in. Quitting after loading a configuration could bring one back as a different mode.
  • Say what replacing a configuration is about to throw away, naming both what it holds and what is on screen, since saving captures what is on screen now.
  • Start the save field on the configuration you are looking at, so replacing one does not mean retyping its name.
  • Stop rebuilding the audio tap during quiet passages, which it was doing roughly every time music stopped.
  • Retune the Punchy response preset, which now reacts harder on both spectrum modes.
  • Say when macOS will not report your desktop picture, which it does for anything set through Wallpaper settings, and offer to read the image file directly instead of leaving Match wallpaper at a dead end.

Kymatra 1.1

2026-08-26

  • Explain every setting. Each row has a help button saying what the control does and which direction it moves.
  • Height means height. It now sets how far the trace reaches, and Sensitivity is how loud the music has to be to get there. The old Height only ever fed a soft clip, so most of its range did nothing.
  • Undo a setting from the row it sits on, shown only where a value is not at its default.
  • A new icon and wordmark, drawn as one letter rather than a letter over a wave.

Kymatra 1.0

2026-08-22

  • First release. A live oscilloscope behind your desktop icons, drawn from the sound your Mac is already playing.
  • Five modes: Bass, Dual, Polar, Radial Bass and Bars.
  • Up to five visualizers at once, each with its own mode, position and colors.
  • Match colors to your desktop picture.
  • Named configurations, saved and restored.
  • Free, signed and notarized.