coppwr For Linux

PipeWire seems to be riding a new wave of popularity as of the last couple of years, and considering just how much it has improved in such a short period, it's no wonder why.

Another aspect that made PipeWire is that it brings a lot more to the table (than PulseAudio) in terms of features. While most features can be configured in the config files, the easiest way is to get your hands on a good GUI tool.

Be that as it may, as I have discovered, there's no be-all-end-all solution. If you want to configure Card profiles, default devices, ports and other basic settings you can use pavucontrol, to control the connections in the graph, you can use qpwgraph or Helvum, as well as give apps such as Carla and Catia a try.

This is the main reason why coppwr exists.

coppwr is a free and open-source GUI for Pipewire. Its main goal is to provide as much control over the PipeWire multimedia server as a typical user can handle.

In short, it provides a decent black-themed GUI that makes inspecting and controlling most basic aspects of PipeWire as easy as possible. It could actually prove itself as a decent PipeWire diagnostic tool, even though it's not built specifically for this.

Before we talk about features, I have to mention that the app has three self-explanatory main sections: Global Tracker, Profiler, and Process Viewer.

In terms of features, coppwr provides the ability to inspect, create and delete (destruct) objects and elements. The app also allows you to edit PipeWire metadata and load modules. I found the Profiler to be quite good as it delivers live profile statistics via various useful graphs.

I have to be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of the app's GUI as a whole. While there's nothing functionally wrong with it, I found the elements to be quite small and difficult to read (gray fonts on black backgrounds).

It was also somewhat of a handful for me personally, but that's mostly because I'm not the type of user who would usually look to configure multimedia servers like PipeWire. Other than that, I think that coppwr can prove itself quite useful for someone who is looking for a nice PipeWire GUI that provides a low level of control.

There are also some exciting planned features which include graph editing, param viewing and editing, and the addition of an event log, which will only make the app even better.