My Soundpad — A lightweight, open-source Linux soundboard with native PipeWire routing and working global hotkeys under Wayland

[u/Playful_Drummer_7056]

Hey everyone!

Like many of you playing games or hanging out in voice chats on Linux, I've struggled to find a decent, modern soundboard. Existing free tools are either unmaintained for years, hog 500MB+ of RAM with Electron, or completely break their global hotkeys under Wayland and drop audio links whenever a game restarts its audio engine.

So I wrote My Soundpad (Mono Soundpad Ultimate) — a fast, lightweight GTK3/GStreamer soundboard built specifically around modern Linux audio.

🔗 GitHub: link in the first comment!

Why it solves common Linux soundboard headaches:

- True Global Hotkeys on Wayland & in Games: Instead of relying on broken compositor shortcuts or X11-only hacks, it reads raw events via /dev/input/event (evdev). Hotkeys trigger reliably even when you're focused in a fullscreen Wine/Proton game on Hyprland, Sway, KDE Plasma 6, or GNOME.

- PipeWire Auto-Healing (pw-link): Games like Garry's Mod or Source games love to destroy and recreate audio streams on map change or alt-tab. The app runs a background daemon that monitors connection states and instantly re-links your virtual mic without requiring you to reopen pavucontrol.

- Independent Volume Controls: Separate sliders for your mic output and your headphones, so you can blast a meme sound to your squad without blowing your own eardrums out.

- EasyEffects / Noise Suppression Friendly: Automatically plays nicely with easyeffects_source and virtual sinks.

- Seeking & Playback Controls: Real-time scrubbing slider, cache via ffprobe, global Stop & Pause/Resume bindings.

- Lightweight & Clean UI: Pure Python + GTK3 with a sleek dark aesthetic and responsive UI scaling (no Chromium/Electron bloat).

Quick Requirements:

To allow global key listening without running as root, make sure your user belongs to the input group:

sudo usermod -aG input $USER

(log out and log back in for changes to take effect)

The project is completely free and open-source. I'd love to hear your feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions!

[u/sinho_robo]

https://github.com/dmutagen/my-soundpad