Spectra — Audio Visualizer

Spectra turns whatever you are already listening to into a full-screen visual.

Click the toolbar icon on any tab that is playing sound and the page becomes a canvas — bars, waveforms, kaleidoscopes, particle fields, reaction-diffusion — all reacting to the music in real time. Click it again, or press Escape, and everything is exactly as you left it.

There is nothing to set up. No account, no sign-in, no configuration. It readsthe audio your tab is already playing.

WHAT IT DOES

• 24 visualizers, drawn on canvas and driven by live frequency analysis: Attractor, Aurora, Bars, Circular Bars, Circular Wave, Fireworks, Kaleidoscope, Liquid Light, Lissajous, Mandala, Matrix, Network, Oscilloscope, Particles, Phyllotaxis, Plasma, Reaction, Slime Mold, Slow Burn, Spectrogram, Starfield, Tunnel, Voronoi and Waveform.

• Works with the audio you actually listen to. Streaming sites, subscription music services, embedded players, video, podcasts, live streams, browser games — if the tab makes a sound, Spectra can see it.

• Colour controls. Hue, saturation and brightness sliders reshape any visualizer's palette, plus a slider for how far the page behind is dimmed — from a solid backdrop to a transparent overlay on the live page.

• Star your favourites and cycle only those with the arrow keys.

• Full-screen friendly. The overlay fills the whole viewport, so your browser's own full screen (F11) gives you an edge-to-edge visual with nothing else on the display.

• A control bar you can put anywhere. Drag it by its grip; double-click to recenter. It fades out while the pointer is still and comes back when you move.

• Pass-through mode makes the overlay transparent and click-through, so you can reach the page underneath — skip a track, hit play — while the visuals keep running over it.

• Remembers everything: your visualizer, your colours, your favourites, where you put the controls.

KEYBOARD

Esc Close Left/Right Previous / next visualizer T Light / dark palette S Star the current visualizer H Hide or show the control bar C Pass-through (click the page underneath)

Alt+Shift+V toggles Spectra from anywhere.

WHY INSTALL IT

Because music is better with something to look at, and because every other way of getting this is worse. Desktop visualizers mean leaving the browser and routing audio between applications. Web-based ones mean uploading a file or granting a microphone. Spectra works on the tab you already have open, on the service you already pay for, with one click.

It is also genuinely private, which is unusual for something that listens to you. Spectra has no servers because it does not need any:

• No host permissions. It cannot read any website. It is granted access to a single tab, only when you click its icon, and only until you leave that page. • No network access of any kind. It makes no requests. There is nothing to send and nowhere to send it. • No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no ads. • Your audio never leaves the tab. It is analysed in your browser, frame by frame, and never recorded, stored or transmitted.

Your settings are stored locally on your own machine.

A NOTE ON HOW IT HEARS AUDIO

Spectra reads your tab's audio directly, which is what lets it work with protected streams and embedded players that a page-level reader cannot reach. Because capturing a tab removes its sound from your speakers, Spectra plays that audio straight back — so you hear exactly what you would have heard anyway.

Nothing is recorded. Audio is analysed as it plays and discarded frame by frame.

OPEN AND INSPECTABLE

Spectra ships as plain, unminified-in-spirit JavaScript with no remote code, no bundled trackers and no third-party libraries. Everything it does is in the package you are installing.

Remote code: None. Everything executed is included in the package.

Data collection: None.