HeMe2 / chroma_chord

Computer audio playback to light conversion for Razer RGB keyboards on Linux

Chroma Chord

Computer audio to light conversion for Razer RGB keyboards on Linux.

This software is intended to run permanently in the background, so it can grab all the audio played by the computer. Then it uses ColorChord to convert this audio to colorful voronoi diagrams, which are then displayed on the RGB keys of your Razer keyboard using the OpenRazer Python API. After three seconds of silence (eg. no light on the keyboard) the "starlight" effect is set on the keyboard. On quit, the same effect is set.

(Sorry for the shaky cam and the poor quality, some day I will create a better demonstration video.)

I created Chroma Chord as a quick draft two years ago. I wanted to beautify the code and the overall concept. But since it runs flawless on my machine every day, I never found the motivation to finally rework the code. Now I decided to add some documentation and a handy dependency checker and start script creator and finally uplolad my butchered code.

Once I encountered problems with an onboard soundcard, but since I'm not using this, I didn't dig into it. It works very well with the two USB soundcards (interfaces) I've got. And it worked well on my laptops onboard soundcard.

Dependencies

• Linux
• Python3
• OpenRazer
• ColorChord
  • clone project with: git clone --recursive https://github.com/cnlohr/colorchord
  • cd colorchord/colorchord2
  • make

How to Chroma Chord

How to execute this hacky piece of software:

1. Make sure you have OpenRazer installed and a binary of ColorChord.
2. Copy the colorchord binary in the Chroma Chord folder.
3. Set the sourcename of your soundcard in chroma_chord_voronoi.conf Use pactl list | grep pci- | grep monitor to get the name of your device. Or just: pactl list | grep monitor if you're using an USB soundcard or something similar.
4. Run ./create_start_script.py (must be executed from the same folder) This checks whether all dependencies are satisfied and creates the start_chroma_chord.sh
5. Finally start Chroma Chord with the ./start_chroma_chord.sh (can be called from every folder)

If you like you can than add the start_chroma_chord.sh to the autostart of your system.

Licence

Chroma Chord is licenced under the GPL-v3.0-or-later. Copyright (C) 2020 Henning Mende

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

To-Do:

• dim brightness depending on sound amplitude, to get a better beat response
• get rid of code TODOs
• provide this functionality as a output device for colorchord