Press kit

Vitrola is a live wallpaper for macOS. It puts a Technics SL-Q3, a direct-drive turntable from 1979, on a wooden desk by a window over São Paulo, and keeps it in sync with the music playing on your Mac.

When Spotify or Apple Music starts a track, the platter spins up to 33⅓ rpm and the arm swings over and comes down on the record. The cover on the stand and the record label change to the album you're playing, and each song gets its own band of grooves, with the needle on the one that's playing. Skip a song and the arm lifts and lands on the right band.

The room runs on your clock: a hazy morning, a blue midday, gold around five, the city lit up at night. The light was rendered offline in Blender's Cycles, one light source at a time, and is mixed live on the Mac's GPU, so it changes continuously through the day. When it rains in São Paulo, it rains on the window. It uses around 3% CPU while a record plays and stops drawing when windows cover the desktop.

Vitrola was made by Matheus Fidelis in São Paulo and is sold by ONE.ZI TECNOLOGIA LTDA. It's pay what you want, from $4.99 during launch, with a 7-day free trial.