Dropdeck

A 16-pad soundboard for live streams and podcasts on Omarchy, with a one-toggle virtual mic that mixes your pads into your voice for Restream Studio or OBS.

• Dropdown — click the 🔊 pill in the bar for a compact grid.
• Tile — a real floating/tileable window you can keep pinned on screen while recording:

  omarchy-shell shell summon bert.dropdeck '{}'
  

  (omarchy-shell shell hide bert.dropdeck / toggle work the same way. Bind a key to the summon command if you want a hotkey for it.)

Both surfaces show the same 16 pads — assigning or clearing a sound in one updates the other immediately.

Requirements

• Omarchy with the Quickshell-based omarchy-shell (the plugin system).
• PipeWire with the PulseAudio shim — pw-play, pw-record, pactl (all ship with pipewire / pipewire-pulse). Stream mode also uses module-null-sink, module-loopback and module-remap-source, which are part of a stock PipeWire install.
• ffmpeg only if you want to convert an unsupported clip (see below).

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/Bert0424/omarchy-dropdeck.git
omarchy plugin enable bert.dropdeck

add clones the repo into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/bert.dropdeck/; it lands disabled so you can read the code first. enable puts the 🔊 pill on the right side of the bar. Later:

omarchy plugin update bert.dropdeck   # fast-forward pull, shows a diff first
omarchy plugin remove bert.dropdeck

Turn Stream mode off before you remove the plugin. omarchy plugin remove just deletes files — it can't run teardown — so removing while Stream mode is live would strand the virtual-mic PipeWire modules until you restart PipeWire or log out. The plugin tears them down on shell exit / reload as a safety net, but toggling off first is the clean path.

Like every Omarchy plugin, this runs as unsandboxed code inside omarchy-shell. Only add repos whose code you're willing to run.

What it does to your system

Full disclosure, since it runs unsandboxed:

• Runs pw-play (pad playback), pactl (queries inputs; in Stream mode loads/unloads PipeWire modules), and omarchy-notification-send (errors). All are invoked as argument vectors, never through a shell.
• Stream mode loads module-null-sink ×2, module-loopback ×3 and one module-remap-source. stream-mode.sh keeps no state on disk — teardown reads PipeWire's own module list and unloads only those three module types whose args name dropdeck_pads / dropdeck_bus / dropdeck_mic, so a partial build or crash can't leave a half-graph and it can't touch anything that isn't ours.
• Writes exactly one file: ~/.local/state/omarchy/dropdeck-pads.json (pad assignments + your mic choice), via an atomic replace.
• No network access. No telemetry. Never asks for elevated privileges or your password. Nothing written outside ~/.local/state/omarchy/. Your audio files are only ever read, by pw-play.

Assigning sounds

Click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, then click any pad to pick an audio file. Click the pencil again to leave edit mode. In edit mode, assigned pads show a small × to clear them.

Outside edit mode, clicking a pad plays it; clicking a pad that's already playing stops it. "⏹" stops everything at once.

Supported formats: wav, mp3, ogg, opus, flac, aiff (playback is via pw-play, which decodes these directly). m4a/aac is not supported — it'll fail with a notification rather than play. Convert it once: ffmpeg -i clip.m4a clip.ogg.

Recommended source files: short (1–4s) wav or mp3 clips work best — they start instantly with no decode lag, which matters when you're hitting a pad live mid-sentence. ogg/opus are fine too and smaller if you're hoarding a big library. Normalize volume across clips if you can (e.g. ffmpeg-normalize or just eyeballing peaks) so one pad doesn't blast louder than the rest.

Royalty-free libraries safe to use on a public stream (stingers, laugh tracks, buzzers, airhorns):

• Mixkit (mixkit.co/free-sound-effects) — no attribution required
• Pixabay (pixabay.com/sound-effects) — no attribution required
• Freesound.org — huge, but check each clip's license
• Zapsplat — free with a (free) account
• YouTube Audio Library — has a sound-effects tab, cleared for streaming

Avoid clips ripped from TV/movies/games on a monetized or public stream — that's what gets a VOD muted or a copyright strike.

Getting the pads into Restream

Restream Studio (browser-based) only sees whatever audio device you hand it as your "microphone" — it can't reach into PipeWire directly. Flip Stream mode on before you go live and the plugin builds a real virtual microphone that mixes your mic with the pads:

1. Pick the mic that feeds the mix. The tile has a Mic dropdown under the Stream mode switch — leave it on "System default mic" to follow whatever's default, or pin a specific device (e.g. your USB mic for streaming while the laptop mic stays default for calls). The choice is saved. Changing it while live rebuilds the mix in place; the plugin also re-applies it after a shell restart.
2. Toggle Stream mode on (in either the dropdown or the tile).
3. In Restream Studio's mic picker, choose "Dropdeck-Mic". It's a normal-looking input device (not a "Monitor of…" entry — those are hidden by browsers, which is why a raw null-sink monitor won't show up).
4. You'll still hear your own pads locally through your normal speakers/ headphones — that's a separate loopback, not a monitor of your mic.

Turn Stream mode off when you're done to tear the virtual devices back down. If Restream doesn't show the new device right away, close and reopen its mic dropdown (browsers cache the device list per permission grant).

OBS

Same idea, and OBS is less fussy than a browser — it lists every PipeWire source, monitors included. You still want Stream mode on (the pad sink and the mix only exist while it is). Two ways:

• One source, mixed: add an Audio Input Capture on Dropdeck-Mic and you're done — mic + pads, same as Restream. Don't also add your raw mic as a separate source or your voice doubles.
• Separate faders: keep your existing OBS mic source (with whatever noise suppression / EQ you already run on it) and add a second Audio Input Capture on Monitor of Dropdeck-Pads for the pads alone — its own fader and filters. Ignore Dropdeck-Mic in this setup.

Either way, "Desktop Audio" in OBS should stay off, or you'll also capture the local pad monitor and double the pads.

Files

• Service.qml — pad state, playback, stream-mode control (kind service, loaded once at shell startup so it survives either surface being closed).
• BarWidget.qml / BarPopup.qml — the bar pill and its dropdown.
• Tile.qml — the standalone floating window (kind panel).
• Board.qml — the 4×4 grid + stream-mode card + mic picker, shared by both surfaces.
• scripts/stream-mode.sh — PipeWire setup/teardown: the dropdeck_pads sink pads play into, a dropdeck_bus mix sink fed by mic + pads, and a module-remap-source that re-publishes the mix as the dropdeck_mic microphone apps can pick. Graph diagram at the top of the file.

Pad assignments and the mic choice persist in ${XDG_STATE_HOME:-~/.local/state}/omarchy/dropdeck-pads.json.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.