Download MScopes for macOS — free, 3 MB DMG, signed and notarized. macOS 14.4 or later, Apple silicon and Intel.

MScopes listens to whatever the Mac is playing — Apple Music, Spotify, a browser, a DAW — through a system audio tap, so it reacts to the actual digital signal at any volume, on speakers or headphones. No cables, no loopback driver: macOS asks once for permission on first launch.

Classic AVS, faithfully

The complete component set — nested Effect Lists with every blend mode, Superscope, Dynamic Movement / Shift / Distance Modifier, Color Modifier, Texer II, Triangle, Global Variables, Buffer Save, Set Render Mode, Custom BPM, and the common APEs — runs on MScopes' own EEL virtual machine. Line modes, 8-bit truncation, and list persistence are reproduced, so decades-old presets look the way they did. Across a community archive of 13,440 presets, all but ten load and render (the ten depend on Windows-only components: Text, Picture, video, external DLLs).

Modern effects, same engine

Bloom, kaleidoscope, chromatic aberration, shockwave, glitch, anamorphic streaks, lens, radial blur, edge glow, duotone, heat shimmer, CRT, tone mapping, and vignette — plus pixel_shader, which transpiles EEL scripts to Metal and runs them per pixel. A zero-copy Metal backend over the framebuffer's own memory, with the hot classic effects ported to compute kernels, holds a steady 60fps paced by the display. Beat detection — energy-flux onsets, a BPM estimate, and beat phase from the live signal — is exposed to scripts the same way AVS presets expect it.

Gallery

Built-in presets, rendered by the engine, and the app itself:

Presets from the Winamp era, unmodified .avs files played by MScopes — the work of their original authors (Justin Frankel, lone, and others), not part of this repository:

Presets & libraries

MScopes ships with its own built-in presets. Point it at a folder and every .avs underneath is listed and searchable — the thousands of community presets from the Winamp era are content you bring, not a bundled library. Numbered sequences become albums that play in order.

Apple Music plugin

A visualizer inside Music itself, installed with one click from the app. Today it runs the bar/waveform renderer with the same shared beat detector; the full preset engine is linked in but not yet routed to it.

Open source engine

The portable C++ engine, the headless vizrender tool, and the macOS app are BSD-3-Clause and built from one repository — not a fork of the Winamp source tree, but a fresh implementation of the classic effects. A CMake build produces the engine and its self-tests on any platform; the macOS app and Apple Music plugin are one XcodeGen project on top of it.

Download

MScopes is free. Download the latest MScopes (3 MB disk image), open it and drag MScopes to Applications. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other download. It is not on the Mac App Store: the store's sandbox blocks the system-audio tap the app is built on. Every release, with checksums, is listed on GitHub Releases. Requires macOS 14.4 or later; universal for Apple silicon and Intel.