Embed An Audio Visualizer On Your Linux Desktop Background Using GLava (PPA Installation And Configuration Guide)

GLava is an OpenGL audio spectrum visualizer for Linux (X11). Using it, you can make a real-time audio visualizer appear as if it's embedded in your desktop background.

Wallpaper Engine / Rainmeter may not be available on Linux, but there are other ways of getting an animated wallpaper on Linux desktops. GLava is one of them, great for those who want a desktop background that displays a configurable audio visualizer.

GLava displays the audio spectrum visualizer on top of the wallpaper, making it appear as if you're using a live, animated wallpaper, with the added bonus that you can still have icons on your desktop, as GLava has an option to allow clicks through its window (automatically enabled when running GLava with --desktop).

GLava makes use of PulseAudio to sync the desktop audio visualizer with any music source you're using, including audio player like Audacious or Rhythmbox, Spotify, as well as web browsers like Chrome or Firefox.

The desktop audio visualizer application supports most EWMH-compliant window managers. This includes Mutter (Gnome, Budgie), KWin (KDE), Unity, Openbox (LXDE), Xfwm (XFCE), Fluxbox, IceWM or Bspwm. A few have some minor known issues, while others, like Enlightenment, need testing. You can see a list of supported window managers and their status by visiting this link.

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GLava requires X11 (Xext, Xcomposite and Xrender) and PulseAudio, and it comes with 5 different visualizers:

• bars: cava style vertical bar visualizer
• radial: similar to bars, except bars are drawn around a circle
• graph: draw a vertical, solid graph of the fft output data
• wave: draw the raw left audio wave recieved from PulseAudio
• circle: draw a circle-style visualizer, where the radius is the visualizer amplitude

I should also mention that the tool includes a multitude of customization options, though there's no GUI to easily tweak its settings. Instead, the GLava options are available in its rc.glsl configuration file. In this file you can enable or disable window hints, use native, xroot or no window opacity, specify the window background color, and much more. You can also set the window geometry in this file, so you can properly align the audio spectrum visualizer with your desktop and/or place it on the desired monitor in multi-monitor setups.

Each visualizer type (called "mod") can also be customized - you can change the colors, transparency, and much more. These can be changed by modifying the mod file (circle.glsl, bars.glsl, and so on).

Before using GLava to embed a live audio visualizer on your desktop background, I should note that GLava can be a bit CPU-intensive. On my 8 core system, the CPU usage is about 3.3% (or around 25-30% for one CPU core, as reported by htop).

In the screenshot at the top of this article I'm using 2 GLava audio visualizers embedded on my desktop: radial (the one in the middle), and bars (at the bottom). This is another screenshot, this time using only one OpenGL audio spectrum visualizer - graph:


Since a simple screenshot is not exactly enough for an audio visualizer, here's a video recorded by the GLava developer, showing multiple GLava audio visualizers (bars at the bottom, circle on the left, radial on the right, and graph in the upper part of the screen) running in the same time on the desktop background:


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Installing and configuring GLava OpenGL audio spectrum visualizer

Like I was mentioning a while back, I created a PPA for application that I use and are not available in Ubuntu. The PPA is growing slowly, and today it got a new package - GLava.

GLava can be installed from the Linux Uprising Apps PPA on Ubuntu 19.04, 18.10 or 18.04, Linux Mint 19.* (there's a dependency that's not available in Ubuntu 16.04 / Linux Mint 18 so I couldn't get it to work in this Ubuntu version) and other Linux distributions based on Ubuntu 18.04, like elementary OS 5.0 Juno:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/apps
sudo apt update
sudo apt install glava

You also have the alternative of downloading the DEB package for your Ubuntu version (use the Ubuntu bionic package in Linux Mint 19 or elementary OS 5.0 Juno) instead of adding the PPA.

Fedora users can install GLava by using the ycollet/linuxmao Copr repository. Add it and install GLava using:

sudo dnf copr enable ycollet/linuxmao
sudo dnf install glava

In case you don't use Ubuntu / Linux Mint or Fedora, you can find instructions for installing GLava from source (and links to AUR packages) on its project page.

Now that GLava is installed, it's time to set it up.

1. Initial GLava configuration

The first thing you need to do is to copy its default configuration files to your home directory (~/.config/glava). This can be done automatically by running GLava with the --copy-config option in a terminal, like this:

glava --copy-config

2. Changing the GLava window geometry to match your desktop resolution (and move it to the desired monitor in multi-monitors setups)

To embed the GLava OpenGL audio spectrum visualizer on your desktop background, run it with the --desktop flag. This flag enables running Glava as a desktop window by detecting the desktop environment and setting the appropriate properties. Using this, the GLava window won't show up on your application launcher / dock, it won't have any window borders, the window will be set to allow clicks through it, and so on. Always launch it with --desktop, unless you want to run it in a regular window.

Let's launch GLava with the --desktop flag:

glava --desktop

Play some audio in any application, and you should see the GLava audio visualizer embedded in your desktop. Chances are its size and position is wrong though. Let's fix this.

GLava can be configured by editing its rc.glsl configuration file, which is available in the ~/.config/glava folder (it's created here after running GLava with --copy-config, as explained above). Open your file manager, navigate to ~/.config/glava, and open the rc.glsl file with a text editor.

Look for the line that begins with #request setgeometry. Here you can specify the size of the GLava embedded window, as well as its X and Y offset, so you can set it on the monitor you desire, in case you have a multi-monitor setup.

If you have only one monitor, leave the first two values (X and Y) as 0, and modify the last two values (width and height) to your screen resolution. For example, if you have only one display with the resolution of 1920x1080, you'd have to set #request setgeometry like this: #request setgeometry 0 0 1920 1080.

X and Y (the first two values) are horizontal and vertical offsets (with 0 0 being the top left corner). On multiple monitors setups, if you want to move the GLava window on another monitor you'll have to change the X (first) value. Using "0" will show the GLava visualizer on the left-most monitor. Change the X value to the resolution of your left monitor to move the GLava window on the monitor to the right. For example, use #request setgeometry 1920 0 1920 1080 to show it on the second monitor (from left to right).

You can also raise the GLava window so it doesn't start right at bottom of the screen, by changing the Y (second) value, useful in case you have some dock at the bottom and you want the GLava audio visualizer to be displayed above it. For example, if you don't see the GLava visualizer on your desktop, try to set the Y value to -150.

After making changes to the ~/.config/glava/rc.glsl configuration file, close GLava (use Ctrl + C in the terminal to send the interrupt signal), then run it again to see your changes.

There are various other options in the GLava configuration file, with proper descriptions, so take a look and change the options to suit your needs. But besides the window geometry and visualizer type, most default options should be enough for most users.

The next customizations are optional, that's why I didn't number them. This is in case you want to change some of the GLava options or run multiple instances with different audio visualizers, and you don't know where to begin.

Once you're done, run GLava like this:

glava --desktop

Play some music and GLava should now show an animated audio visualizer on top of your wallpaper.

(As a side note, remember to always run GLava with the --desktop flag, or else the visualizer won't appear to be embedded in your desktop wallpaper and instead, a normal, but transparent window will be shown, which appears in your application launcher, has window borders, etc., which is probably not what you want.)

(Optional) How to add GLava to startup

It's best to run GLava at startup with a delay, so your desktop loads before launching the application, or else it might not work properly. For this reason we'll use the following startup command: sh -c 'sleep 10 && glava --desktop' (where "10" is a delay of 10 seconds before running Glava, and the GLava launch command is glava --desktop, but you can modify this if you want to launch it with a particular configuration file (see below), etc.).

To add GLava to startup, launch Startup Applications or similar from your applications menu, and add a new startup entry with the name "GLava" and this as the startup command: sh -c 'sleep 10 && glava --desktop'.

You can also do this manually, by creating a file called glava.desktop in ~/.config/autostart/ with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=sh -c 'sleep 10 && glava --desktop'
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=GLava

(Optional) How to change the GLava music visualizer type

Another thing you might want to change in the GLava configuration file is the visualizer type. bars is used by default, but you can change it to radial, graph, wave or circle. To change this, open the same ~/.config/glava/rc.glsl file and change the bars from the #request mod bars line to one of the visualizers I mentioned above.

(Optional) How to display multiple GLava visualizers (with different visualizer types) on your desktop background

There are two ways of displaying multiple GLava visualizers (with different visualizer types) in the same time, useful if you want to have multiple music visualizers embedded in your desktop background.

The first one involves creating a new configuration .glsl file in ~/.config/glava. You can start by copying the original rc.glsl file (using a different name), and make changes to it. Then run a new GLava instance by using the --entry flag followed by the new configuration file name (without the file path - the new configuration file must be placed in ~/.config/glava). For example:

glava --desktop --entry=mycustomconfig.glsl

Another way of running another GLava instance with a different visualizer type than the one specified in the default rc.glsl configuration file is to specify the visualizer type ("mod") on the second (and third, etc.) instance, using the --force-mod flag. For example, to run a new GLava instance that uses the circle visualizer, run this command:

glava --desktop --force-mod=circle

Where the --force-mod value can be bars, radial, graph, wave or circle.

(Optional) How to change individual visualizer types (mods) settings

GLava supports changing various settings for each of its visualizer mods (bars, radial, graph, wave or circle). The settings for these are not included in the main configuration file (rc.glsl), but in separate files.

In the GLava configuration folder (~/.config/glava) you should find a file for each of these mods, called bars.glsl, circle.gls, graph.glsl and so on. Depending on the mod type, in these files you can change visualizer settings like the colors, transparency, amplify magnitude, and much more.

Each of these options is explained directly in each .glsl file, so open the file for the visualizer mod you want to change and look at the comments there to see what each option does.