PulseAudio Control

A feature-full volume control module for PulseAudio. Also known as Pavolume. Main features:

• Increase/Decrease and Mute the default sink's audio.
• Switch between sinks easily. You can also blacklist useless devices.
• Optionally enable notifications and OSD messages.
• Works as a shortcut to pavucontrol or your favorite audio manager tool.
• Check Configuration for more.

Dependencies

pulseaudio with pactl and pacmd in your $PATH. You might want to have pavucontrol installed to easily control pulseaudio with a GUI. The script can send notifications if enabled, for which you'll need a notification daemon like dunst.

To be able to switch the default sinks from this script you might need to disable stream target device restore by editing the corresponing line in /etc/pulse/default.pa to:

load-module module-stream-restore restore_device=false

At a minimum, bash version 4 is required to run the script. You can check your bash version by running:

bash --version

Configuration

You can change the script configuration at the beginning of the file:

Name	Values	Description
OSD	"yes" / "no"	Will display an OSD message when changing volume if set to true.
INC	Numerical	Sets the increment/decrease that each volume up/down will perform.
MAX_VOL	Numerical	Maximum volume.
AUTOSYNC	"yes" / "no"	Will automatically sync all program volumes with the volume of your current sink (output) whenever you change the volume. This is useful if you manage multiple outputs and have issues with the app volumes becoming out of sync with the output.
VOLUME_ICONS	Bash array with i cons like ( "🔉" "🔊" )*	Icons used for the volume (ordered by sound level). The volume levels are divided by the number of icons inside it. For example, if you are using 4 icons and MAX_VOL is 100, they will show up in order when the volume is lower than 25, 50, 75 and 100. This is useful because some fonts only have 2 volume levels while others can have up to 4.
MUTED_ICON	String*	Icon used for the muted volume.
MUTED_COLOR	String (polybar color)	Color used when the audio is muted.
NOTIFICATIONS	"yes" / "no"	Sends a notification when the sink is changed.
SINK_ICON	String*	Icon always displayed to the left of the sink names.
SINK_BLACKLIST	Bash array	A blacklist for whenever sinks are switched. Use pactl list sinks short to see all active sink names.
SINK_NICKNAMES	Bash associative array	Maps the PulseAudio sink names to human-readable nicknames. Use pactl list sinks short to obtain the active sinks names. If unconfigured, Sink #N is used instead. Custom icons* for the sinks can be added here if SINK_ICON is set to "".

*Check the Useful icons section for examples.

Module

The example from the screenshot can:

• Raise and decrease the volume on mousewheel scroll
• Mute the audio on left click
• Switch between devices on mousewheel click
• Open pavucontrol on right click

[module/pulseaudio-control]
type = custom/script
tail = true
label=%output%
format-underline = ${colors.blue}

exec = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/pulseaudio-control.bash listen
click-right = exec pavucontrol &
click-left = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/pulseaudio-control.bash togmute
click-middle = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/pulseaudio-control.bash next-sink
scroll-up = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/pulseaudio-control.bash up
scroll-down = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/pulseaudio-control.bash down
label-padding = 2
label-foreground = ${colors.foreground}

Note that you will have to change the paths above to where your script is saved. You might want to change or remove the colors and labels, too.

Usage

Here are all the available actions, in case you want to modify the module above, or want to use it for different reasons:

Usage: pulseaudio-control.bash ACTION

Actions:
    help              display this help and exit
    output            print the PulseAudio status once
    listen            listen for changes in PulseAudio to automatically
                      update this script's output
    up, down          increase or decrease the default sink's volume
    mute, unmute      mute or unmute the default sink's audio
    togmute           switch between muted and unmuted
    next-sink         switch to the next available sink
    sync              synchronize all the output streams volume to
                      the be the same as the current sink's volume

Useful icons

Here's a list with some icons from different fonts you can copy-paste. Most have an space afterwards so that the module has a bit of spacing. They may appear bugged on Firefox if the font isn't available there. Please add yours if they aren't in the list.

Font name	Volumes	Muted	Sink icons
FontAwesome	(" " " ")	" "	" ", " "
Material	(" " " " " ")	" "	" ", " ", " "
Emoji	("🔈 " "🔉 " "🔊 ")	"🔇 "	"🔈 ", "🎧"
Emoji v2	("🕨 " "🕩 " "🕪 ")	"🔇 "	"🕨 ", "🎧"

Most of these can be used after downloading a Nerd Font, or from your distro's repository.

Sources

Part of the script and of this README's info was taken from customlinux.blogspot.com, the creator. It was later adapted to fit polybar. It is also mixed with the ArcoLinux version, which implemented the listen action to use less resources.

Development

Any PRs and issues are welcome! The tests can be ran with bats tests.bats.