Support
Most questions are about permissions, and most of those have the same answer. Start here; if none of it helps, write to me directly.
Get in touch
Email me@jonjaques.com. That is my own address, not a queue — Synesthia is free and a side project rather than a business, so I cannot promise a response time, but I read every message and I will do my best to fix what is broken.
Synesthia is open source under the MIT license. If you would rather file a bug in public — or read the code that is doing the thing you are asking about — the repository is at github.com/jonjaques/synesthia, and issues go here.
When something is broken, these details make it far quicker to fix:
- Your macOS version and Mac model.
- Which audio source you had selected.
- Whether you downloaded from the Mac App Store or from this site.
- What you expected to happen, and what happened instead.
Requirements
- macOS 15 or later
- Apple silicon or Intel
- A Mac with Metal support (any physical Mac that runs macOS 15)
Common questions
The window is black and nothing is moving.
The canvas only reacts to sound that is actually playing. Check that the source in the control bar matches where your audio is coming from, that the listen button is lit, and that something is playing. If you just granted a permission, see the next item.
I allowed Screen & System Audio Recording but it still does not work.
macOS often does not hand a freshly granted capture permission to an app that is already running. Press the listen button once more; if it still fails, quit Synesthia and open it again. This is a quirk of how macOS delivers the grant, not a setting you have missed.
Why does a music visualizer need screen recording permission?
macOS gives an app no way to record system audio on its own. The only route Apple provides is screen recording, which can carry the sound alongside the picture — so that is the permission macOS asks for. Synesthia takes the picture at 2×2 pixels and throws every frame away. It never captures your screen.
Can I use it without granting anything?
Yes. Synesthia ships with a demo track that plays with no permissions at all, and the “Audio file” source plays any file you pick yourself — choosing a file in the open panel is itself the permission.
The fans spin up / my battery drains.
Synesthia stops rendering entirely when its window is hidden, minimised, or behind another window, and drops to a low frame rate when nothing is playing. If you are seeing heavy load with the window visible and audio playing, that is the GPU doing the work it is meant to — try a smaller window or a different visualizer.
My display keeps going to sleep. / My display never sleeps.
Synesthia holds a display-sleep assertion only while audio is actually flowing, and releases it the moment playback stops. Stop the listen button and normal sleep behaviour returns immediately.
I have photosensitivity concerns.
Turn on System Settings › Accessibility › Display › Reduce Motion. Synesthia honours it: the animation clock slows, beat-driven flashing is heavily damped, and brightness changes are smoothed so they drift rather than strobe.
Where did the Music app source go?
It is gone from both versions, and nothing was lost with it. Music has no audio stream of its own to tap, so that source always went through the same system-audio capture — choose “System audio” and it hears Music exactly as before. The track name still appears on its own in both versions. The one thing only the version from this site can do is drive playback: play, pause and skip buttons, plus real album artwork.
It says Metal is unavailable.
Synesthia renders on the GPU and needs Metal. This message almost always means it is running in a virtual machine without graphics acceleration. It cannot be worked around in software.
Resetting permissions
If a permission is in a confused state, the reliable fix is to remove Synesthia from the relevant list in System Settings › Privacy & Security (Screen & System Audio Recording, Microphone, or Automation), then quit and reopen the app so it asks again.
Privacy
The app collects nothing and contains no analytics. Its only network traffic is the update check in the version downloaded from this site, which asks this server whether a newer build exists and sends nothing about you or your music; the Mac App Store version does not even do that. This website is separate, and does use analytics. The full statement is on the privacy page.
Synesthia is made by Jon Jaques.