Screen & Audio Sync

Beyond the effects catalog, Nexus can drive your lighting from what is on your screen or from what you are listening to. Both run locally on your PC.

1. Screen mirror

Mirror mode projects your monitor onto your lighting: devices behind and around the screen extend the picture, ambient-light style.

  1. Open Lighting and select the Mirror tab.
  2. Pick which screen to mirror under Monitor (each detected monitor is a button). On systems where the OS mediates screen capture, a Change screen button opens the system picker instead.
  3. Choose a filter:
    • Pass-Through maps the screen image directly onto the canvas, so each device shows the colors from its part of the screen.
    • Reactive analyzes the dominant colors on screen and renders them as a smooth ambient glow instead of a literal copy - calmer on desktop work, punchier on scene changes.

The Effect Editor dock adds color post-processing in Mirror mode: the palette ring, Saturation, Contrast, and Mirror Horizontal / Mirror Vertical flips. With the Reactive filter active, two more sliders appear: Reactivity and Intensity.

Like Animation and Media, Mirror mode can be frozen with the Pause control on its tab.

2. Audio-reactive effects

The Audio Reactive category in the Animation browser holds effects driven by your audio: Spectrum Bars, Spectrum Radial, Oscilloscope, Bass Pulse, Beat Strobe, Harmonic Star, Audio Tunnel, Bass Bloom, and Beat Builder. Nexus listens to what your PC is playing (the system audio output, not a microphone), so they react to any music source.

With an audio effect selected, a Music Reactive toggle appears on the canvas preview. It switches audio capture on or off; each audio effect also has its own Audio Intensity slider to scale how hard it reacts.

Note

With Music Reactive off (or nothing playing), audio effects fall back to their idle animation instead of going dark.

3. Beat Builder

Beat Builder is the build-your-own music visualizer: a composable layout of spectrum bars, meters, and beat-driven accents you shape with its controls in the Effect Editor:

  • Color Mode (Solid / Rainbow) and Center Style (Bars / Smooth / Dots / Radial).
  • Layout toggles: Top Meters, Corner Fills, and Bottom Bars, with Top Height and Bottom Height sliders.
  • Spectrum shaping: Bars, Bar Width, Size, Gain, and Noise Gate.
  • Beat accents: Beat Color, Beat Flash, Beat Pulse, plus Background level and Audio Intensity.

Like every effect it keeps four preset slots, so you can save a subtle desk setup and a full party wall side by side and switch instantly. See Effects & the Editor for how presets work.