cava-driven · conky widget · liquid glass
Sixteen bars of real audio, rendered in liquid glass, sitting quietly on your desktop background where a system monitor used to be.
Three small pieces, each doing one job. No polling loops, no blocking calls inside Conky's draw cycle.
Reads your audio output's monitor source and splits it into 16 frequency bands, 30 times a second.
Pipes cava's stream through a FIFO and overwrites one tiny file with just the latest frame.
A cheap, bounded file read every tick — then Cairo paints the glass and the bars.
Built to sit in a Conky rig without adding a spawn, a poll, or a stutter.
Driven by cava against your actual output monitor — the bars mean something.
Base fill, reflections, specular gloss, inner glow, and a gradient border — all hand-tuned in Cairo.
A thin white cap floats above each bar and falls slowly, like the meters on real hardware.
Resize the Conky window; a single cairo_scale() fits the whole layout to it.
widget.lua never talks to cava directly — just a small, bounded read of a file feed.sh keeps current.
Mint at rest, amber climbing, coral at the peaks — amplitude is legible at a glance.
Everything below lives in widget.lua's
W.settings table.
false to drop the glass panel and float the bars directly on the desktop.440×180 design canvas.bars = in cava.conf if you change it.0 to 1.