Audio robustness improvements

[aastefanov]

• make a gizmo that monitors pw-top's ERR column and beats the user with a stick when errors happen
  • I think it is enough to make a cli tool that is very fast and just prints the total number of Pipewire errors on stdout; Then, this tool can be called from swaybar or similar
• OBS dynamically adjusts its quant when errors happen, figure out a way to disable this; might require patching obs
• pw-profiler is a friend, run it on the test machine and debug latency issues

[aastefanov]

pls dont hate me:

watch -n0.2 "pw-top -b -n 1 | awk -F' ' '{print \$9}' | tail -n +1 | jq -s 'add'"

[dexterlb]

perfect, this works!

can you write a shell script that is a bit smarter and prints two numbers:

• the total number of errors
• the number of errors in the last 5 minutes

it can assume that it will be called every second and use an intermediate temporary file (/tmp/pipewire_err_count.txt) to store errors and timestamps, so that it is able to get the error count from 5 minutes ago and subtract them

then @gotha can incorporate this as part of ricing the sway status bar (display the two numbers and highlight it in red if the number of errors in the last 5min is greater than 0)

[aastefanov]

Vnimanie vnimanie: Vibe-coded script, wouldn't use in prod

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

in short: if we rm -rf /*, blame the LLM

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eu

TMP=/tmp/pipewire_err_count.txt
WINDOW=300   # 5 minutes
KEEP=600     # keep ~10 minutes of history
now=$(date +%s)

# extract column 9 from all lines and sum only integer rows
errors=$(timeout 1 pw-top -b -n 1 2>/dev/null \
  | awk '{print $9}' \
  | awk '/^-?[0-9]+$/ {s+=$1} END {print s+0}')

errors=${errors:-0}

printf "%s %s\n" "$now" "$errors" >> "$TMP"

# prune old entries
cutoff=$((now - KEEP))
[ -f "$TMP" ] && awk -v c="$cutoff" '$1 >= c' "$TMP" > "${TMP}.tmp" && mv "${TMP}.tmp" "$TMP"

# find latest recorded total at or before now-WINDOW
target=$((now - WINDOW))
prev=$(awk -v t="$target" '$1 <= t {p=$2} END {print p+0}' "$TMP" 2>/dev/null)

# handle counter reset
if [ "$errors" -lt "$prev" ]; then
  delta=$errors
else
  delta=$((errors - prev))
fi