CapyPlayer

An Animated Desktop Media Player for Wayland

Many desktop music widgets are bloated, rely on heavy web technologies, or lack personality. CapyPlayer is a lightweight, native desktop widget built in Rust and Slint that brings interactive, customizable music players directly to your Linux desktop surface.

Whether playing music through Spotify, Firefox, or a local media player, CapyPlayer syncs live with your media sessions to display playback states, spinning vinyl record animations, and real-time audio spectrums.

Key Pillars & Features

1. The `capy-mpris` Engine

Under the hood, CapyPlayer is powered by capy-mpris, a standalone, high-performance Rust crate built on zbus. It manages Linux media sessions with:

Efficient Resource Management: Uses a single persistent D-Bus connection instead of repeatedly spawning processes.
Smooth Playback Interpolation: Calculates song progress smoothly on the client side without continuously burdening media players with status requests.
Smart Player Prioritization: Automatically switches to the active source when you alternate between Spotify and a browser tab, for example.
Reusable Library: Designed as a decoupled crate that can also be used in taskbars, status bars, or CLI tools.

2. Modular, Animated Vinyl Skins

CapyPlayer includes multiple visual themes for any desktop layout:

Realistic Turntable: A nostalgic record player with a spinning vinyl disk and playback controls.
Compact Turntable: A sleek, vertical design ideal for sidebars or smaller screens.
Vinyl Card: A modern horizontal card with track information, album art, and an integrated audio visualizer.

3. Dynamic Color Extraction & Adaptive Styling

The widget automatically analyzes the dominant colors of the current album artwork. The background glow, accent colors, and interface elements dynamically adapt their color palette with every new song.

4. Native Wayland & Desktop Integration

Layer-Shell Support: Integrates seamlessly as a desktop layer within modern Wayland compositors (such as Hyprland, Niri, Sway, and River).
Smooth CAVA Visualizer: Displays real-time frequency bars and audio animations directly on the card.

5. Hot-Reloading Configuration

Switch skins or adjust settings directly in ~/.config/capy-player/config.toml — changes take effect immediately without needing to restart the application.

Technologies Used

UI Toolkit: Slint UI (compiled native GUI).
Programming Language: Rust.
Media & D-Bus: capy-mpris (custom standalone crate based on zbus).
Desktop Protocol: Wayland Layer-Shell (via spell-framework).
Audio Visualization: CAVA audio spectrum processor.

Skins

Realistic Vinyl Player

A skeuomorphic turntable layout. It includes a singular button to play/pause the current track &.

Compact Vinyl Player

A streamlined, vertically oriented deck designed for compact screen real estate or sidebar placement. It includes play/pause, next & previous buttons.

Vinyl Card

A sleek horizontal card showcasing track metadata, vinyl album art and an audio visualizer. Clicking on the vinyl will hide the rest of the card, only displaying the vinyl.