The best music visualizer for Linux, and how to choose one.

Linux has never lacked music visualizers, but most of them are tools: bars in a terminal, a spectrum in a media player's corner, a preset engine you tune by hand. LIQUIDWAVE comes at it from the other side. It is a desktop app of 60+ scenes, each one composed as a finished picture, that hears whatever your desktop is playing and runs as a single AppImage. This page compares it with the visualizers Linux users already know, and says plainly where those are the better pick.

What to look for

What it hears. Media-player visualizers (Kodi, Audacious, VLC) draw only what that player plays. To see Spotify, a browser tab or a game, you want an app that reads the monitor of your default output through PipeWire or PulseAudio.

What it looks like. Terminal bars, preset engines and curated scenes are three different things to watch. Pick the one you'd leave running on a second screen all evening.

How it installs. A distribution package, a Flatpak, Steam or a single AppImage all behave differently when your distribution upgrades.

The options, compared

App	What it is	Hears	Notes
LIQUIDWAVE	Desktop app, 60+ curated scenes in ten styles	Default output via PipeWire or PulseAudio, or the microphone	AppImage for x86-64; Desktop Mode on X11; full screen when you are away
projectM	Preset engine, MilkDrop compatible, 1,000+ presets	System audio takes extra setup, by its own store page	Free and open source; on Steam
cava	Spectrum bars in the terminal	PipeWire by default; PulseAudio, ALSA, JACK	Free, open source, active
GLava	OpenGL bars and waves, can sit on the desktop	PulseAudio	Last release in 2019
Kodi	Media center with visualization add-ons	Its own playback	projectM and Shadertoy add-ons
Audacious	Music player	Its own playback	Scope, spectrum and VU meter plug-ins
linux-wallpaperengine	Unofficial runner for Wallpaper Engine wallpapers	PulseAudio	Needs Wallpaper Engine bought on Steam

Why people pick LIQUIDWAVE

Scenes made like pictures. A drawn waveform, a field of op-art rings, a wireframe sea, a stage lit by lasers, liquid chrome, a lava lamp, a green oscilloscope. Each scene has its own palette and its own way of moving, and they are grouped into ten styles. They are the same scenes as on the Mac, not a lighter port.

The music moves each part on purpose. LIQUIDWAVE splits the sound into seven bands on every frame and picks out the kick, the snare and the hi-hat, so a bassline lifts one thing and a hi-hat shimmers another. Motion follows the tempo instead of jumping on every beat, and the chrome scenes never flash their light.

It hears the whole desktop. System Audio listens to the monitor of your default output, through PipeWire (pipewire-pulse works) or PulseAudio, so anything that plays through it moves the picture. Listen Mode hears the room through the microphone instead, for a turntable or a band.

It fits into the desktop. Close the window and it waits in the tray (StatusNotifierItem, as KDE and most panels show it). The Now Playing card reads the track and cover from your player over MPRIS. Desktop Mode plays a scene behind your icons on X11, and When you're away fills every screen once you leave the computer alone. Scene Recording saves an MP4 of the scene with its sound.

Where another tool is the better fit

• You live in a terminal. cava is light, scriptable and beautiful in its own way.
• You want thousands of presets, or to write your own. projectM loads MilkDrop presets; LIQUIDWAVE has no preset editor.
• Your music only ever plays in Kodi. Its add-ons are already there.

Honest notes

• x86-64 only. The AppImage needs glibc 2.35 or later (Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36 and others from 2022 on) and a GPU with Vulkan. There is no ARM build yet.
• Desktop Mode needs X11. Wayland doesn't let an app place a window under the desktop icons, so on a Wayland session the setting says it isn't available. The rest of the app runs on Wayland too.
• System Audio needs PipeWire or PulseAudio. On a bare ALSA system, use Listen Mode.
• Scene Recording uses your system's codecs. If the record button doesn't appear, install your distribution's multimedia codecs (on Ubuntu, ubuntu-restricted-extras).
• GNOME without a tray extension has nowhere to keep the app, so closing the window quits it there.
• Mix Shuffle, which picks scenes with Apple Intelligence, is on the Mac only.

Try it

Download LIQUIDWAVE for Linux, make the AppImage executable (right-click → Properties, or chmod +x LIQUIDWAVE.AppImage) and open it. It updates itself. Wave is free, and the first time you open the app you pick one more scene, also free and with no time limit. One purchase inside the app unlocks the rest.