Pipeswitch

Daemon for PipeWire that automatically links audio inputs and outputs based on regex for similarly to how QjackCtl's patchbay works on Jack.

Written entirely in Rust using official pipewire-bindings, by implementing listeners similar to those provided by pw-link.

If you're looking for an interactive albeit non-automatic graph GUI for PipeWire, you might want to check out Helvum

Installation

Not ArchLinux

Unfortunately there are no other packages available right away, but luckily Pipeswitch is a simple binary, so you should be able to just grab the .zip from the release and boot the binary right up.

On top of that if you place the binary in ~/.local/bin/pipeswitchd, you should be able to use the service provided as well right away, for example by placing it in ~/.config/systemd/user/pipeswitchd.service.

ArchLinux

Arch users can simply install pipeswitchd or pipeswitchd-bin from AUR, and then enable the pipeswitchd-service, ie. by running

systemctl --user enable pipeswitchd

Features

Works as a single service running in the system background
Lightning fast
Is able to hot-reload configuration
- Optionally destroys links that are no longer configured and
- Creates new links
Accepts RegEx for matching inputs and outputs. Able to match client-name, node-name and port-names seperately. (Node-name is usually the one you want, and the one listed ie. in Helvum)
- If port-name is not specified, has an option to link ports according to their channel (so left-ear matches left-ear)
- RegEx always expects to match the whole client/node/port-name. (Node-name, if in/out is simply a string)

Config

Configuration is done with a toml file that is located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pipeswitch.toml

The format is following:

# Comments made here should persist through automatic edits.
[general]
# keep links that dont exist in the config anymore
linger_links = false
# inotify listen config and reload when it changes
hotreload_config = true

[log]
# trace / debug / info / warn / error
# Not updated with hotreload
level = "info"

# In and out share the same syntax, both can be expressed as objects or strings.
# Client, Node and Port are technical terms in Pipewire.  
# Always always you're interested in only the Node.
[link.some_default_link]

# Objects have client, node and port -fields, all of which are optional
source = { client = "client_1", node = "node_1" }

# Strings always refer to only the node-name.
sink = "Hello there!"

# Optional per-link config  
# if true (default), and ports are not specified in the object-notation, ports
# are connected if they are in the same channel. Left goes into Left, Right into
# Right. Mono only connects to mono even in this special case.
special_empty_ports = true

# A second link for the sake of demonstration
[link.second_link]
source = "Hello there!"
sink = "Some sink"

You can preview what inputs/outputs are currently available with pw-link -o and pw-link -i or using Helvum. Note: pw-link lists both node-names and port-names.

Another tool you might find useful is pw-dump, where the relevant fields are node.name, application.name and port.name respectively.

note: When naming headers (such as [link.second_link]), it is important to remember TOML semantics. link. at the beginning is important (it has a semantic meaning), the part after that simply signifies the name of the link, which can contain alphanumeric characters, such as some characters supported by TOML like _, or -. Refer to the TOML spec on which characters are good to go.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3

ForumPlayer / pipeswitch