Add a music visualizer to your Mac's menu bar

Dynamic Menu Bar’s music visualizer turns the top edge of your Mac’s screen into audio-reactive bars or waves, colored from the playing album’s artwork if you like, at up to 120 Hz on displays that can. It listens to the Mac’s audio output, so it reacts to Music, Spotify, a browser, or anything else that plays sound. Here is how to set it up and what each control does.

Set it up

1. Download Dynamic Menu Bar, drag it to Applications and open it. The welcome tour starts a free 7-day trial of every feature; the app is notarized by Apple.
2. Open Settings › Music visualizer and turn it on. Grant the permission macOS asks for the first time, which is how the app hears what is playing.
3. Choose Bars or Waves, play something, and watch the top edge of the screen.

The visualizer runs on macOS 26 Tahoe or later, alongside whichever color style the bar is using — or on its own over Tahoe’s clear bar, if you like the bar as Apple left it.

Bars or waves

Bars are the classic spectrum: set their thickness and the gap between them. Waves flow softly along the edge; set how many there are, how soft their edges are, their opacity, and whether peaks and the full spectrum show. Both run at up to 120 Hz on a ProMotion display and at the display’s own rate elsewhere.

Colors

Mono keeps the visualizer one shade; Solid is a color of your own; Rainbow runs the spectrum across it; Palette gives the waves a set of colors of yours; and Artwork takes the color from the cover of whatever is playing, so the bar changes with the album.

Trail and glow

A falling trail lingers behind each bar as it drops, and a glow breathes with the music. Both have their own amounts, and both can be off.

The progress bar and track controls

A thin line along the top edge fills with the current track, in mono, a solid color or rainbow. It is also a control: hold ⌥ — or the modifier you choose — and click or drag to seek. ⌥ ← and ⌥ → skip 10 seconds; ⌥ ↑ and ⌥ ↓ go to the next or previous track. The bar can hide itself after a pause of 5 to 30 seconds and comes back when playback resumes.

Performance

The visualizer is drawn by the same native Swift app as the rest of the overlay, and it does not sample the screen. If you also use the Live color style, that style’s sampling rate is the setting that matters on battery: 10 frames a second is the easiest, 15 the default. A global shortcut toggles the visualizer on and off from anywhere, and per-app profiles decide where it appears — on for Music, off for a video call.

What it works with

Anything that plays sound on the Mac: Music, Spotify, a browser tab, a game. The Artwork color mode uses the cover of the track the system reports as playing; where nothing reports one, the other color modes carry on as before. The features page lists every setting the visualizer has, and the guide to changing the menu bar color covers the bar beneath it.