Music Wallpaper Stuck After You Pause the Music
If your Mac lock screen kept showing the last song's colors after you paused the music, this is the release that fixed it. It also got noticeably lighter to run.
Music wallpapers had been out for a day when the reports started: you pause the music, your desktop goes back to normal, and your lock screen is still showing the colors of the song you stopped.
This release fixes that, and makes the whole effect cheaper to run while it is there.
Quick answer: If your lock screen keeps the last song's colors after you pause, you are on an older version. Update, and pausing puts both your desktop and your lock screen back the way they were.
The Lock Screen Goes Back to Normal Now
Pause or stop your music and both surfaces return to whatever you had before. No leftovers, nothing to reset by hand.
While we were in there, the way the wallpaper follows your cursor got smoother. It used to snap; now it drifts after the pointer with a bit of lag, which is a small thing that makes the whole effect feel less like software.
A Third Less Work for the Same Picture
The music wallpaper now costs about a third less to run than it did at launch, and it looks exactly the same.
Most of that came from the app doing things out of habit: redoing work every fraction of a second that only needed doing when the song changed, and checking on things that had not changed since the last time it looked. None of it was visible, all of it was costing you something.
A wallpaper should not be a program you are aware of. Months later we measured a running wallpaper properly and published the numbers in the battery and performance test; the short version is in the performance FAQ.
How to Tell If This Is You
The giveaway is specific: the desktop resets when you pause, the lock screen does not, and you only find out the next time you lock your Mac.
If that sounds familiar, open the Wallper icon in your menu bar and check for an update. From a few versions later the app started telling you about updates on its own, but at this point you still had to look.
Related
Running an older build is the usual reason this is still happening. Get the current version of Wallper, free for 7 days.
