Ambient noise applet for Plasma 5

This applet for the KDE Plasma desktop allows to reproduce ambient noise. Multiple noise components can be combined, controlling their individual volume. The applet reads noise files and their icons from a given, customisable folder. The noise and the icon must be in the same folder and share the same name, except for the file extension.

The plasmoid remembers its state across reboots, including play/pause status, volume, and active noise components. To prevent it from playing sound at start-up, even if it was still playing at the time of the last shutdown, go to the plasmoid settings and tick "Paused at start-up".

Free noises in a ready-to-use format for this plasmoid can be found in the anoise project.

Build and install

The applet can be installed locally with

git clone https://github.com/m-pilia/plasma-applet-ambientnoise
cd plasma-applet-ambientnoise/
kpackagetool5 -t Plasma/Applet --install plasmoid

or globally with

git clone https://github.com/m-pilia/plasma-applet-ambientnoise
cd plasma-applet-ambientnoise/
cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kf5-config --prefix`
make
sudo make install

To see the plasmoid, you may need to restart plasmashell

kquitapp5 plasmashell
kstart5 plasmashell

Contribute

Questions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome. Feel free to open an issue on GitHub.

New translations are welcome. Translation files are located in the translations folder. To add a new translation:

• Copy the template file plasma_applet_org.kde.plasma.ambientnoise.pot to plasma_applet_org.kde.plasma.ambientnoise_XX.po (where XX is the ISO 639-1 code for the language you are adding).
• Fill all the fields inside the file.
• Add two lines to plasmoid/metadata.desktop as follows, next to the corresponding pre-existing lines (once again, XX represents the ISO code of the new language):
  • Name[XX]=... filled with a translation of the name;
  • Comment[XX]=... filled with a translation of the comment.
• Commit and open a pull request on GitHub.

Troubleshooting

In case something seems not to be working, launch the plasmoid in debug mode from a console, with plasmoidviewer -a org.kde.plasma.ambientnoise or plasmawindowed org.kde.plasma.ambientnoise, and look for relevant log messages. Especially when it comes to audio playback, most of the troubles come from bad configuration of the multimedia back-end, or missing plugins.

If no audio is played, or the audio plays but the volume controls do not work, or if you see messages like Error: "The autoaudiosink element is missing." or Warning: "No volume control found", try installing gst-plugins-good.

License

The project is licensed under GPL 3. See LICENSE file for the full license.