(I’m not flexing or anything, but I want to make sure you understand that this issue is probably specific to your PC.)
I own two PCs (one for making wallpapers and an ordinary laptop), and I’ve never faced this issue.

However, since the wallpaper was made by me, there might be several reasons why this is happening. I'll categorize them below:


The wallpaper has had several updates over time (adding, fixing, and/or removing stuff and broken assets).

Don’t worry, it’s easy if you follow these steps carefully:

1. Open Wallpaper Engine and find my wallpaper: right-click → open in explorer (keep this tab open for later and make sure you don’t explore further to avoid complicating things or causing issues).
   
2. Unsubscribe (whether you do this from Steam’s Wallpaper Engine workshop or the software’s interface doesn’t matter).
   
3. Close Wallpaper Engine from the taskbar (the arrow facing up on the right side of Windows Taskbar).
   
4. Temporarily shut down Steam and all Valve-related services (follow the same steps as closing Wallpaper Engine, then press "ctrl+shift+esc" to open Task Manager and force close any remaining services).
   
5. Go back to the file explorer tab we left open. Make sure you haven’t switched tabs, then select all of my wallpaper related files (ctrl+A) and delete them.
   
6. Empty the recycle bin.
   
7. Reopen Steam.
   
8. Resubscribe to the wallpaper from wherever is most convenient for you.

Hopefully, this method will remove all old assets and fix the issue.


You might have a music player like Spotify or a browser playing audio in the background.

Check in the Wallpaper Engine settings (not the wallpaper’s “user properties”) if you have the option to mute the wallpaper’s audio whenever something else is playing.


This might sound strange, but I have a permanent issue caused by moving the Wallpaper Engine installation folder to another drive (action performed from Steam a long time ago). This prevents me from editing the Wallpaper Engine sound settings. I can toggle options, but the sound settings are broken (e.g., I can’t automatically mute wallpapers with audio when another source is playing music).

Uninstall and reinstall Wallpaper Engine, knowing you will have to wait for all wallpapers to download again.


I’m a wallpaper creator with about 100+ projects (tests, scene scripts, and assets for other wallpapers) on my drive. I’m not aware of a method to preserve all my offline wallpapers for a fresh update whenever I want.

I’m afraid that even if moving all the wallpapers and project folders to another location works, I won’t be able to update a wallpaper if I want to.

You might think this doesn’t make sense and it should logically work, but:

• My laziness is so profound it could be studied by scientists.
  
• I have an irrational fear of technology messing up.
  
• Did I mention I’m lazy?
  
• Seriously, I’m terrified of losing my precious wallpapers.