A now-playing music widget with a live audio visualizer, docked right into the Windows 11 taskbar. It shows whatever you are listening to — Spotify, YouTube, any app or website with media — with album art, playback controls and a real audio spectrum. Everything is customizable.
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- Works with anything that plays audio — no API keys, no logins, no accounts. It reads the same global media session Windows itself uses.
- Real audio visualizer with per-process loopback capture: it reacts to your music app only, so games and notifications don't move the bars.
- Album art driven colors, 6 visualizer styles, 5 themes and your own presets.
- Fully local: zero network connections, zero telemetry. One dependency (NAudio).
- Windows 11, or Windows 10 version 2004 or newer
- .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (not needed if you grab the self-contained build from Releases)
Download the latest .zip from Releases, unzip it anywhere and
run TaskbarTunes.exe. There is no installer — it's a single portable executable.
On first run SmartScreen will warn you because the executable is not code-signed (signing requires a paid certificate): More info → Run anyway.
Settings live in %APPDATA%\TaskbarTunes\. Deleting that folder resets the app.
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Single click | Expanded panel: large album art, full title, seek bar with times |
| Click the progress bar | Jump to that point in the song |
| Drag | Move the widget along the taskbar (or anywhere on screen in free mode) |
| Double click | Configurable action (play/pause by default) |
| Right click | Music source, song history (last 50), free overlay mode, Settings, exit |
| Hover | Playback controls appear |
| Tray icon | Settings, "Start with Windows", exit |
Settings apply live and are saved automatically.
- Appearance — width, corner radius, position (next to the clock / centered / left / custom / free overlay), font family and size, background and text colors via a built-in HSV color picker with transparency.
- Visualizer — 6 styles (bars, mirrored bars, wave, filled wave, dots, retro LEDs), bar count, spacing, opacity, gradient direction, adaptive color taken from the album art and a beat mode that follows the bass only.
- Content — toggle album art, artist, controls, progress bar, source icon, YouTube title cleanup, and hiding the widget when nothing is playing.
- Themes — 5 built-in (Spotify, Neon, Monochrome, Retro amber, Adaptive) plus your own presets.
- Extras — native Win11 acrylic blur, spinning vinyl album art with crossfade, multi-monitor support, and free overlay mode that floats above windowed and borderless-fullscreen games.
| Piece | Technique |
|---|---|
| Taskbar docking | Borderless WPF window positioned over Shell_TrayWnd through Win32; a 500 ms timer re-asserts topmost and follows taskbar auto-hide |
| Track info | Windows.Media.Control (GSMTC) for title, artist, album art and transport controls — no web APIs |
| Visualizer | Per-process WASAPI loopback (Windows 10 2004+) → 1024-point FFT with a Hann window → 64 logarithmic bands with auto-gain → ~33 fps render. Switchable to whole-system audio in Settings |
git clone https://github.com/ClaudioPenta/TaskbarTunes.git
cd TaskbarTunes
dotnet buildFramework-dependent single file:
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false /p:PublishSingleFile=trueSelf-contained single file (~75 MB, no .NET runtime needed on the target machine):
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true `
/p:PublishSingleFile=true /p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true `
/p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true- Album art from YouTube depends on the thumbnail the browser reports.
- With Firefox the source may be classified as "Other" (its app id does not contain "firefox"): music still shows, but title cleanup is skipped and the visualizer falls back to whole-system audio.
- If the taskbar is set to auto-hide, the widget hides and reappears with it.
- Free overlay mode draws over windowed and borderless-fullscreen games; Windows does not allow drawing over exclusive fullscreen.
- The progress bar needs the app to report track duration (Spotify does; in a browser it depends on the site).
GPL-3.0 — you are free to use, study, modify and share it, and any derivative work must stay open under the same license.