Spectral

What it does

Spectral reads what Windows is already playing and draws it: album art, track title, artist, a duration bar, and a live audio spectrum that moves with the music.

No API keys. No account. No Premium requirement. Spotify, browsers, media players, and most DAWs all work.

Two ways to use it

On your desktop. Open the popout and keep it wherever you like — a floating now-playing widget with prev / play-pause / next controls for supported sources. Drag it anywhere, size it how you want, and it stays put.

On stream. Add one browser source in OBS or Streamlabs and point it at the local address Spectral gives you. The overlay box is the same size in every layout, so you set the source once and never resize it again.

Either way it runs quietly in the tray and keeps going as long as you want it to.

Runs entirely on your machine

There is no account to create, no API key to paste, and no sign-in of any kind. Spectral's local server is bound to your own computer and is not reachable from your network.

Finds the audio for you

Auto-Detect follows whichever app is actually playing and switches with it. You can also capture a single app, a specific input device, or an ASIO interface with per-channel Left/Right selection.

Make it yours

• Five layouts — Compact, Stacked, Spectrum-Only, and two Merged panels.

• Color themes, hex inputs for every surface, and Art Sync to recolor the overlay from each album cover.

• Glows on cover, cards, text, and spectrum.

• Animated gradients: Card Sweep and Warp fill.

• Custom cover images, including animated GIF and video.

• Save any look as a preset and export it to another PC.

Works with what you already use

Spectral reads the Windows media session, so it works with anything that reports what it is playing. No integration, no plugin, nothing to configure in the other app. Tested with:

Streaming and web players — Spotify, Tidal, YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Amazon Music

Browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera

Local players — VLC, Windows Media Player

Audio workstations — REAPER, Bitwig Studio, FL Studio, Ableton Live

Anything else — pick any app as the audio source manually, including Discord and games

The only time it goes online is to look up cover art for the track you are playing, from public music databases. Nothing about what you play, capture, or configure is collected or sent anywhere.

Rendering runs on your GPU, and Spectral quietly throttles itself when nothing is happening — so it stays smooth without taking the CPU headroom your encoder needs.

Presets

Start from a stylized preset, change anything you like, and save it as your own — layout, colors, glows and gradients all travel together, and export carries the whole look to another PC.

Spectrum

Up to 48 bars with per-band smoothing, bar roundness, gradients, and edge lifts. Frame-rate independent, so it looks identical at 60 fps in a capture and on a 144 Hz monitor.