PipeFlow

Fun-In-Progress GUI for PipeWire

Features

• Display Nodes, Ports and Links
• Create and destroy Links
• Set channel volume (for ALSA and PulseAudio)
• Move Nodes (but will be reset after model changes!)

Todo

• for wireplumber things wait for v0.5, has big changes?
  • https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2023/06/15/wireplumber-event-dispatcher-new-simplified-way-handling-pipewire-events/
• user change node/port label
• user set auto/default links/nodes!
• how to best auto layout?
• can we set all (audio) nodes channelVolume?
  • seems we can for alsa and pulse. what about jack?
• what is softVolume?
• show live audio levels?
• un/lock channel volume sliders
• can we use https://gitlab.com/matpi/pipewire-py ?
  • i guess we would look pw-dump code for howto?

Bugs

• find them polish loops... (and why does it still work, or what is not working?!)

Theme

theme.ini file is loaded from these dirs in this order:

• Next to program
• User: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pipeflow (default $HOME/.config/pipeflow)
• System: pipeflow dir in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (default /etc/xdg/)

Requirements

• pyside6 - https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/
  • python3 - https://www.python.org/
  • qt6-declarative - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-index.html
• pw-dump, pw-link and pw-cli - https://pipewire.org/

Packaging

• Copy dir libpipeflow to Pythons system include dir
• Copy dir PipeFlow to QMLs system include dir
• Copy file pipeflow to system bin dir
• Copy file main.qml to /usr/lib/pipeflow/main.qml
• Copy file theme.ini to /etc/xdg/pipeflow/theme.ini

see distro/archlinux/PKGBUILD for an example

Development

The python code provides following things to QML:

thing	description
NodeModel	List Model of PipeWire Nodes
LinkModel	List Model of PipeWire Links
PwLink	Functions to call pw-link
PwCli	Functions to call pw-cli
Theme	Theme properties

And the QML UI "simply" builds around these models, and calls functions to request changes to PipeWire...

If you have entr installed, you can start pipeflow in "hot reloading" way with:

$ make hot

restart this if you add files

Links

• TODO: any thips? https://github.com/dyegoaurelio/simple-wireplumber-gui
• https://docs.pipewire.org/page_objects_design.html
• https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/examples/example_qml_editingmodel.html
• volume infos https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3351

Licence

MIT