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How to get music visualizations on Windows 11

The Media Player app in Windows 11 doesn't have visualizations. Not hidden, not behind a setting: they're gone. Here's what happened, and the two ways to get music visuals back on your PC in about a minute.

Does the new Media Player have visualizations?

No. The Media Player app that ships with Windows 11 (the one that replaced Groove Music) plays your music over album art on a blurred background, and that's it. There is no visualization menu, no plugin system, and Microsoft has not announced any plan to bring visualizations back.

That ended a twenty-year tradition. Windows Media Player shipped with Alchemy, Bars and Waves, and Battery, and for a lot of people those were the first music visualizations they ever saw. If you want the full story of what was removed and when, we wrote it up on the Windows Media Player visualizer page, and the bigger picture of why every player dropped its visualizer is in What happened to music visualizers?

Option 1: the hidden legacy Windows Media Player

Windows 11 still quietly includes the classic player, renamed Windows Media Player Legacy. Press the Windows key, type “Windows Media Player Legacy”, and it should appear (it also lives under Windows Tools in the Start menu's app list). Play a local file, right-click, and the old visualization menu is still there.

Before you settle in, know its limits:

  • It only visualizes local files it is playing itself. Spotify, YouTube, and anything in a browser are invisible to it.
  • It is unmaintained software in maintenance mode. It looks and feels like 2009, and Microsoft can remove it in any future Windows update.
  • The extra visualization packs you might remember downloading are gone for good; the plugin format is no longer supported, so only the built-ins remain.

If your music library is a folder of MP3s and you just want Alchemy back for old times' sake, this works. For everything else, there's a better option.

Option 2: a visualizer that works with everything

vizz.fm is a free music visualizer that runs in your browser. Because it listens to your PC's system audio, it reacts to whatever you play, in any app: the Windows 11 Media Player, Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, a game, anything. Nothing to install, no account, no watermark, and it can't be removed by a Windows update.

Here's the whole setup:

  1. Open the vizz.fm app

    Go to vizz.fm/app in Chrome, Edge, or Brave.

  2. Choose System audio as the source

    Click the audio source button and pick System audio. In the share dialog, select a window or your entire screen, switch on Also share system audio, and click Share. (Full walkthrough with screenshots here.)

  3. Play music anywhere

    Hit play in whatever app you like. The visualizer reacts to your PC's audio in real time.

  4. Go fullscreen

    Press F for fullscreen and U to hide the controls. Full-screen visuals, just like WMP used to do, on a modern GPU renderer.

What about Alchemy and the classics?

The original visualization plugins can't run on modern Windows, but their looks live on. In vizz.fm, the shader scenes bloom and fold through color the way Alchemy did, and the frequency bar and waveform scenes give you the honest spectrum-analyzer readout of Bars and Waves, at far higher resolution. Browse the scenes to see them, or if your nostalgia runs more toward Winamp, there's a Milkdrop page for you too.

Watch your music again.

Free, in your browser, reacting to anything Windows plays. No download.

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