Switchbox

A modern media routing application for PipeWire built with Rust and libcosmic.

Switchbox provides an intuitive graphical interface for managing audio, video, and MIDI connections between PipeWire nodes — with the goal of surpassing existing tools.

Note: the project is in the early stages of development.

Features

• Visual patchbay for PipeWire source and sink connections (WIP)
• Color-coded ports by media type (Audio, Video, MIDI)
• Filterable view by media type and device class (WIP)
• Node inspector with detailed information and internal routing (WIP)
• Bezier curve link visualization
• Hover and selection highlighting
• COSMIC desktop integration (context drawers, theming, localization)

Roadmap

Version	Focus
v1.0	Non-persistent media routing; applet functionality (system tray, launch at start, right-click menu)
v2.0	Advanced and persistent audio routing via inspector and busses, that remembers connected devices
v3.0	Audio plugin support (CLAP, VST3, LV2)
v4.0	Advanced MIDI/Video routing; internal controller routing

Installation

A justfile is included by default for the casey/just command runner.

• just builds the application with the default just build-release recipe
• just run builds and runs the application
• just install installs the project into the system
• just vendor creates a vendored tarball
• just build-vendored compiles with vendored dependencies from that tarball
• just check runs clippy on the project to check for linter warnings
• just check-json can be used by IDEs that support LSP

Translators

Fluent is used for localization of the software. Fluent's translation files are found in the i18n directory. New translations may copy the English (en) localization of the project, rename en to the desired ISO 639-1 language code, and then translations can be provided for each message identifier. If no translation is necessary, the message may be omitted.

Packaging

If packaging for a Linux distribution, vendor dependencies locally with the vendor rule, and build with the vendored sources using the build-vendored rule. When installing files, use the rootdir and prefix variables to change installation paths.

just vendor
just build-vendored
just rootdir=debian/switchbox prefix=/usr install

It is recommended to build a source tarball with the vendored dependencies, which can typically be done by running just vendor on the host system before it enters the build environment.

Developers

Developers should install rustup and configure their editor to use rust-analyzer. To improve compilation times, disable LTO in the release profile, install the mold linker, and configure sccache for use with Rust. The mold linker will only improve link times if LTO is disabled.

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0).