ScrobbleWallA wallpaper that moves — without the covers moving
Give your Last.fm wallpapers a little movement. Soft lights, flowing water or falling snow animate the background while your album covers and music stay easy to read.
Movement behind your music
The background moves. The album covers, the titles and the clock stay in place. Your music remains the focus while the animation plays behind it.
Choose an effect, adjust its opacity, colour variation and speed, then preview the result with your own wallpaper before applying it.
What moves, and how much
A video loop over your own colours
Eight ship with the app — aurora, water, smoke, lights, falling lights, snow, whirl and waves — Ten seconds each, except falling lights (24 seconds), about 4.1 MB for all eight. They are ours, not stock footage, and they are deliberately dark and slow because their job is to sit behind album art without competing with it. The clips are prepared for a smooth repeating transition; playback smoothness also depends on your computer and the selected speed.
The clip does not replace your wallpaper's background. That background is a heavy blur of the very album covers on screen, which is where the colour comes from, and it stays underneath — an opacity slider decides how much of the clip you see over it. At the default it is a texture, not a takeover.
A drift in colour
A second slider lets that blurred background wander in hue, slowly and within a range you set, and come back. Nothing else changes: the same lights and shadows, the same image, a different tone. Set it to zero and the background is exactly the one the wallpaper was drawn with.
Or a video of yours
Supported files can include mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, avi, mkv and webm, depending on the codecs available in Windows. Pick a file and it becomes the background, filled and cropped to each screen the way Windows does it, with your covers on top. The file is tested the moment you choose it, so if it cannot be played you are told there and then rather than finding a black desktop later.
What it costs to run
The animation targets 24 frames per second. Resource use varies with your processor, screen resolution, number of monitors and video settings. Use the built-in preview and desktop test to check the result on your PC.
Drawing pauses when the desktop is covered
Pausing stops video decoding and drawing. The background process still checks when to resume, so total CPU usage is low but not guaranteed to be zero.
It stops on its own when:
- Something is running fullscreen — a game, a film, a presentation. Windows reports this state itself, so the animation can pause while you play.
- The session is locked, or the screen is off.
- A window covers the desktop. A maximised browser or editor is enough: if no part of any screen is showing the wallpaper, there is nothing to animate.
It picks up again the moment the desktop comes back — when you minimise everything, or press Win+D — and the movement continues from where it was instead of jumping.
And little enough while you are
Resource use depends on video resolution, playback speed, monitor layout and other applications. Start with a bundled clip at normal speed and use the built-in preview to check how it feels on your PC.
- No codecs and no extra runtime. Video is decoded with Media Foundation, included in standard Windows 10 and 11 editions. Windows N requires the Media Feature Pack. No extra decoder is installed, and no decoder is bundled — that is why the download is still around 30 MB.
- Drawn on the CPU with plain Windows drawing calls. There is no 3D engine, no shader pipeline and no browser engine behind this effect.
- One decode for every screen. The video frame is decoded once and drawn to each monitor.
- Videos are decoded frame by frame. The whole clip is not loaded into memory. Memory can remain allocated while drawing is paused so playback can resume smoothly.
- Wallpaper assignments are cached. The cache updates when the app changes a wallpaper and at regular intervals.
- The bundled clips are deliberately small. Short looping clips at a low resolution, blurred into the background anyway. A 4K clip would cost several times more to decode and would look no different behind your covers.
Your own video is decoded at whatever size it was encoded, so its cost is set by the file rather than by your monitor: a 4K clip on a 1080p screen is the one way to make this expensive, and it buys nothing.
Turning it on
It is off by default. Tick Animated background in the main window and use the small gear beside it to choose between the drawn effects and a video. Everything else — which wallpapers rotate, how often, what shows on which screen — keeps working exactly as before.
Questions
Can I have a different animated background on each monitor?
Each screen can show a different wallpaper, and the moving background is shared across them. Per-screen video loops are not supported yet.
Does it drain the battery on a laptop?
It will use more power than a still image; anything that draws continuously does. The mitigation is that it stops whenever the desktop is not visible, which on a laptop is most of the time. If you want it off entirely, untick it.
Why is my own video not accepted?
Almost certainly an unusual codec. Windows plays common H.264 mp4 files out of the box; more exotic containers or codecs may need something the system does not have, and the app deliberately does not bundle decoders. Re-encoding the clip to H.264 mp4 fixes it.
Is this the same as Wallpaper Engine or Lively?
No. Those play whatever you give them and are far broader for that. This animates a wallpaper it drew itself from your listening history. The comparison page goes through it properly.