Audio HUD — KDE Plasma 6 Widget

A native Wayland/Plasma 6 desktop widget that shows live audio information from PipeWire.

Support

Features

• DAC info — active output device, codec, sample rate, bit depth
• Stream monitoring — active playback apps with their format
• Bit-perfect indicator — green when all streams match the sink format exactly, red when PipeWire is resampling
• Mute detection — volume icon and bar reflect mute state
• Dynamic sink icon — switches between headphones, speakers, HDMI, and generic icons
• PipeWire offline detection — widget dims and shows ⚠ OFFLINE if PipeWire stops responding
• Adaptive theming — follows your KDE color scheme automatically

Requirements

• KDE Plasma 6.0+
• PipeWire with pactl (pulseaudio-utils / pipewire-pulse)
• plasma5support package

Installation

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/contents/ui
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/contents/code
unzip audio-hud.plasmoid -d /tmp/audiohud
cp /tmp/audiohud/audio-hud/metadata.json ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/
cp /tmp/audiohud/audio-hud/contents/ui/main.qml ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/contents/ui/
cp /tmp/audiohud/audio-hud/contents/code/*.sh ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/contents/code/
chmod +x ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.github.audiohud/contents/code/*.sh
plasmashell --replace &

Then right-click desktop → Add Widgets → search Audio HUD.

Notes

• The widget reads codec info from /proc/asound/ and scans card0–card3
• All helper scripts are bundled inside the plasmoid under contents/code/
• No Python dependency — fully self-contained QML/shell