Running waybar with cava enabled gives only semicolons in the bar

[lokesh-krishna]

Running waybar with cava enabled and with some audio playing only gives me semicolons where the module is.
This is my config: waybar config

Screenshot of what this looks like:

It is the center module but all that's there are semicolons. There is no error or other output.

I'm on Arch and running Hyprland 0.28.0. I have cava 0.9.0-1.

Please lemme know if there's any other relevant information that I can provide.

[smsteward]

I'm affected by this as well. I think the culprit is cava is latching onto the input monitor of the default audio device instead of the output monitor. I've tried the solutions in upstream cava issues 422 and and 451, but with no luck. I'm using pipewire and wireplumber to manage audio, so I think it's an issue with cava not playing nicely with pipewire.

[smsteward]

Ok, so I was finally able to get it to work. Turns out it wasn't pipewire at all, just config errors.

Make sure you have "format-icons" : ["▁", "▂", "▃", "▄", "▅", "▆", "▇", "█" ] in your cava waybar config settings, and you either uncomment the bar_delimiter option in your cava config file, or set "bar_delimiter": 0 in your waybar module setting.

[raffaem]

I have this problem, tried this and didn't work

[LukashonakV]

Please see my comments in #2801. But further discussion is better to proceed there

[LukashonakV]

In short, please try to increase thedelay parameter to 4, 6, 8 seconds. Restart waybar and wait for this delay. Then try to play the music. On the author's machine, the waybar starts much faster than the pipe wire server. This leads to early interaction with the audio server when it is not ready, and a silent module termination