Everything Spiroshader™ does

Three visual formats, one playlist

Spiroshader plays three kinds of visual content, freely mixed in the same playlist.

Classic MilkDrop visuals. MilkDrop presets can produce flowing color, geometric shapes, particles, waves, tunnels, plasma and feedback effects. Spiroshader supports MilkDrop 1 and MilkDrop 2 presets, including custom shaders, waves, shapes and sprites used by more elaborate presets.

About the included presets during Early Access. Spiroshader ships with a small, curated library of its own presets, and we are expanding it during Early Access. Spiroshader can also index, measure and play compatible presets you add yourself, from a folder or as pack files. Third-party presets are not included, and WiderUp does not review or endorse them: their authors’ licenses apply, and you use them at your own risk. Preset licensing explains how Spiroshader shows the credits and license information a preset carries.

Modern shader art. Spiroshader also runs Shadertoy-style GPU shaders, multipass included: glowing alien landscapes, fractals, fluid simulations, procedural cities, clouds, ray-marched worlds, abstract geometry and experimental digital art. A shader preset can be written to react to the music through Spiroshader’s audio analysis, and how it responds is part of the preset itself, so each visual has its own character of reactivity.

Images. Photos, digital artwork and HDR images (Radiance HDR, OpenEXR) can be part of a playlist too, as backgrounds, interludes or calmer moments between animated scenes.

Visuals that move with your music

Spiroshader continuously analyzes the audio and hands that information to every preset built to use it. Depending on how a preset is authored, it can react to bass and percussion, midrange and vocals, high frequencies, musical peaks, the full frequency spectrum, and overall energy and dynamics. The result can be subtle and atmospheric or locked hard to the beat.

For each preset you can also adjust how the audio is analyzed: smoothing, frequency balance, sensitivity and spectrum flavor. The preset itself decides how that information shapes the picture.

Tune each preset without editing it

Spiroshader includes a real-time enhancement pipeline made for music visualization. Choose an enhancement level and let Spiroshader handle the rest, then tune each preset on its own: glow, vividness and clarity; motion speed, beat sensitivity and motion timing mode; how the audio is analyzed (spectrum flavor, band split, smoothing). Every control carries a link icon. A linked control follows your global default. An unlinked control keeps that preset’s own value permanently. Nothing touches the original file. An older preset can be adjusted for a modern display while a carefully tuned new preset keeps its own look. Each preset remembers its own overrides between sessions.

Rendering resolution is independent of the window size. Visuals render at a resolution of your choosing and scale cleanly to the display. Each preset can carry its own preferred render resolution, and a machine-wide modifier scales every preset’s choice at once, balancing image quality and GPU load across a diverse library. A performance profile sets every performance setting in one click. On the first start Spiroshader measures your graphics hardware and picks one for you, and you can change it at any time.

HDR rendering

On an HDR display, Spiroshader keeps the visual pipeline in high dynamic range. Glowing highlights reach above ordinary SDR white. Separate controls for MilkDrop, shader and image presets set how rich the colors get and how far the highlights rise, from a subtle added depth to dramatic highlights.

HDR output requires an HDR-capable display and a supported Vulkan, Direct3D 12 or Metal setup.

Build the session you want

A playlist can hold anything from a handful of favorites to an entire library. Play in order, shuffle, or let your ratings decide what appears more often. Each entry can have its own duration. Mark any preset as a favorite, rate it or skip it, and lock the current preset to hold it. Save and load named playlists, or export one as a file and import it on another computer. The loaded playlist comes back at the next start, and playback can be controlled with mouse, keyboard, gamepad or touch.

Transitions are smooth crossfades with a library of animated blend styles, or instant cuts, including automatic cuts on strong musical peaks.

Install entire collections at once

Preset collections ship as single package files that bundle presets, textures and playlists. Install a package with Install Pack…, then enable or disable whole packs with one click. That way you can keep separate libraries for different moods, events or displays. Presets inside packs are read on demand, so packs do not multiply your disk usage with extracted copies. A pack of your own is an ordinary ZIP file with a presets/ folder; textures, playlists, preview images and a pack.json with its name, author and description are optional.

Find the right preset in a large library

A preset library can grow to thousands of files, and a folder of files gives you no way to find the right one. Spiroshader indexes every loose file and installed pack into one searchable database and gives you the tools to use it.

Measured, not guessed. Every preset can carry six visual characteristics on a 0-1 scale: Complexity · Movement · Colors · Brightness · Flicker · Patterns. Some packs ship with authored values. Spiroshader measures the rest itself by rendering each preset briefly against a reference clip. This runs in the background at low priority, with no playback and no interruption. Turn it on for new imports, or run it once over your whole library.

Filter by what it looks like. Something colorful but calm? Dark with very little movement? Nothing that strobes during a chill set? Each characteristic is a sortable column in search and a two-way filter slider (at most, or at least), next to rating, favorites and skip marks. The playlist has its own metric filter, so automatic advance and random picks skip presets outside your limits.

Search, preview, tag. Results appear as you type across name, author, tags and metadata. Turn on Preview and the highlighted result plays live, rendered by the actual engine; queue one result or every match at once, and undo. Presets take free-form key:value tags such as mood:ambient, theme:space or event:party, so you can organize by whatever system works for you. Tag once, find it later. The filter settings are saved with your preferences.

Playlists that scale. Play in order or shuffle weighted by your ratings. Playlists offer per-entry durations, favorites, skip marks, a lock for the current preset and drag-and-drop editing, and they are saved across sessions. They work as well for a handful of favorites as for an entire library.

Your library state on every computer. With Steam Cloud, your ratings, favorites, skip marks, per-preset settings and tags follow you to your other computers, wherever the same presets are installed.

Keep credits and license metadata with the preset

Visual presets have been shared online for decades, and many old files carry little information about authorship or permitted uses. Spiroshader reads optional metadata alongside a preset: authors, sources, tags, textures, tuning and license terms. When that information is present, it displays the credits and can build a copyable credit block from the recorded metadata. The block is a starting point: it has the same format for every license, and a license can ask for its own wording, order or notices, so check it against the applicable license before you publish it. The software does not decide whether a use is legally permitted. It keeps the information you need to make that determination easier to find. Spiroshader’s own included presets are released under CC0 1.0 or, at your option, 0BSD. See Preset licensing for details.

Turn your webcam into a psychedelic magic mirror

Point a webcam at yourself, your friends, a dance floor or anything around you, and let Spiroshader transform the live picture in real time. Camera-aware presets use the feed as part of the visual itself: your reflection can stretch into liquid waves, split into kaleidoscopic patterns, trail through glowing feedback, fold into repeating tunnels or vanish into seemingly endless infinity mirrors. In a music-reactive preset the picture does more than distort. Bass hits reshape the image, rhythms send patterns through the frame, and the whole effect evolves with the sound.

With green-screen / chroma-key support, the camera background can be removed so a person, performer or object appears directly inside the generated world. Use it as a party mirror, an interactive dance-floor visual, a green-screen portal into generative worlds, a live backdrop for performers, a camera effect for streams and recordings, or an experimental digital mirror. A basic setup needs only a webcam and some music.

Your logo, alive in the visuals

Turn every visual into branded content for a stream, a club night or an event. Add your logo as a transparent PNG and keep it on screen across every preset as a watermark. It stays where you put it through preset changes and transitions. Or feed it into the preset, so the same warps, feedback and color that shape the visuals make your logo ripple, melt and swirl with the music. Fire a logo stinger live from a hotkey. Combine it with your camera, keyed or picture-in-picture, and send the result to OBS.

Bring cameras and other applications into the visuals

Spiroshader takes cameras and the video other applications share on the same machine straight into its rendering pipeline: cameras and webcams, Spout sources on Windows, Syphon sources on macOS and PipeWire sources on Linux (Syphon with the Metal renderer, PipeWire input with Vulkan). A live source can be shown over a visual, blended with transparency, isolated with chroma key, or mapped straight into a compatible preset as one of its textures, with settings that apply globally or per preset. Spiroshader publishes its own output the same way, so it can feed OBS or another application in turn.

Your music here, the picture there

Two copies of Spiroshader synchronize over your local network. The machine with the music leads, and the machine at the screen follows the same music, timing, preset and effect changes. The audio travels along so the TV keeps the beat, at a quality anywhere from lossless down to bandwidth-lean, or the leader sends only the analysis and keeps the audio to itself. One follower can be connected. The follower is a copy of Spiroshader too and needs its own license and Steam account. Conductor Mode leads without rendering locally: you run it from its own control panels or over JSON-RPC, for example on a mini PC with no monitor feeding the screen in the next room. The conductor is a copy too and needs its own license. Keep the copies on the same Spiroshader version. On a single computer, the visuals can span several displays as a horizontal or vertical stripe or a 2×2 wall while the interface stays on another screen.

Remote control

Spiroshader is remotely controllable over JSON-RPC on your local network, for scripts, show control and music players. Remote control is off by default, and it can never switch on a camera or another input that could capture you.

Safety tools

Flash protection dims the picture while repeated flashes cover a large part of the screen, and Skip Flickering Presets keeps auto-advance away from presets with a high flicker rating. The blackout turns the picture black at once: with its key (b by default), the button on the visuals, the context menu, a gamepad or a two-finger hold on a touch screen. An output level dims the visuals for dark rooms.

These tools are best effort and not a safety guarantee. They do not offset the health warning: read it before you use Spiroshader or show it to others.

Built for modern graphics hardware

Spiroshader runs natively on each platform’s own graphics interface, with no translation layer. It uses Vulkan, Direct3D 12, Metal or OpenGL, chosen automatically and switchable in the settings (the change applies after a restart).