Simple program to monitor the PulseAudio default sink status efficiently.
pulsemonpulsemon subscribes to the PulseAudio server, and registers a callback for the status of the default sink whenever a change to any sink is detected. More specifically, it listens on PA_SUBSCRIPTION_MASK_SINK and PA_SUBSCRIPTION_MASK_SINK_INPUT, which seemed to cover all the events I needed (all events can be seen here).
This program basically uses zero cpu and memory, since it is event driven is only runs a change is detected.
Each status update is a line of stdout with 3 space separated fields: the output device, volume percentage, and muted/unmuted.
I use this in my lemonbar like this:
pulsemon |
while read card vol mute; do
echo "V${mute} ${vol}"
done |
sed -u -e 's/unmuted//' -e 's/muted//'