Prism — Music Visualizer
Your music, alive.
Scroll sideways for the rest →
Point Prism at any audio playing on your Mac — Spotify, Apple Music, a browser tab, anything — and it renders classic Milkdrop-style visuals in real time. Every colour, ripple, and kaleidoscoping shape reacts as the music happens.
Prism runs genuine .milk preset files through a real, vendored build of the
projectM engine: the same format that powered two decades of Winamp visuals, not a
lookalike. Drop in your own preset packs, browse the curated built-in library of more
than 7,500, or drag a single .milk file onto the window.
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Whatever is playing
System audio is captured through Core Audio process taps, so Prism visualizes any app on the Mac rather than only the one music player it knows about.
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2,500+ real presets
A curated, frame-rate-benchmarked library ships in the app, and any folder of .milk files can be pointed at instead. NestDrop favourites lists are read if your pack has one.
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Album art that moves
When Spotify or Music is playing, Prism lifts the artwork’s subject, pulls its colour palette, and composites it over the visuals with beat-synced parallax. Press ⌘A to hide it and watch the preset alone.
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Smart preset matching
Prism reads a track’s energy, mood, and tempo and picks a preset that suits it, instead of cycling at random.
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Remembers where you were
It reopens on the preset you left, keeps a session history you can step back through with the arrow keys, and keeps the previous session’s log around too.
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Three ways to run it
Prism.app full screen or windowed; a plug-in that appears inside Music’s own Visualizer menu; and a matching screen saver for when the Mac goes idle.
Built for the hardware
Prism is native to Apple Silicon. The projectM C++ engine is bridged into Metal through an ANGLE/EGL context, which keeps the original OpenGL preset semantics intact while rendering on Apple’s modern graphics stack. On a modern (M1+) Mac it clears 800 frames per second.
Details
- Platform
- Mac, macOS 26.0 or later
- Price
- Free
- Category
- Music · Graphics & Design
- Languages
- 22
- Ships as
- App, Music.app visualizer plug-in, and a screen saver
- Permissions
- System audio capture; optionally Apple Events, to read now-playing metadata from Spotify or Music
Privacy
Prism keeps no listening history and records nothing it captures. The one thing that leaves your Mac is the current track’s title and artist, sent to a free public music-data API so preset matching knows the song’s tempo and mood — with no account, device, or personal identifier attached. Read the full privacy policy.