waveform

waveform is a desktop WAV player and waveform viewer built with iced, inspired by the original vulkan-waveform project.

It takes a single WAV path on the command line, decodes the file into memory, starts playback immediately when a default audio device is available, and renders a live multi-channel waveform in a native desktop window.

The waveform view is GPU-backed: the app uploads precomputed peak bins for each channel, aggregates them into screen columns in a compute pass, and draws the result in an iced shader widget with a live playhead.

Features

• Native iced desktop UI with an industrial dark control surface
• Live WAV playback through rodio
• GPU-backed waveform aggregation and rendering
• Multi-channel display with live playhead, zoom, pan, fit, loop, and follow mode
• Transport controls for restart, skip, gain, volume, and playback speed
• Manual WAV decoding for PCM and float RIFF/WAVE files
• Graceful fallback when audio initialization fails: the window still opens and the waveform remains usable

Usage

cargo run --release -- path/to/file.wav

Show CLI help:

cargo run -- --help

The CLI accepts exactly one positional WAV file. Unknown flags fail, and passing more than one file fails.

Build Notes

This project depends on:

• iced
• rodio
• a working graphics stack supported by wgpu
• a default audio output device for playback

If no default audio device is available, the app still opens and renders the waveform, but transport actions remain inert and a status message is shown in the sidebar.

Controls

• Play / Pause: toggle playback
• Restart: jump back to the beginning
• Back 5S / Fwd 5S: seek in fixed steps
• Loop and Follow: toggle looping and automatic viewport following
• Gain, Volume, Speed: adjust waveform scale and playback behavior
• Left-drag on the waveform: seek
• Right-drag on the waveform: pan the visible time window
• Mouse wheel on the waveform: zoom around the cursor
• Horizontal scroll on the waveform: pan

Keyboard shortcuts:

• Space: play/pause
• Home: restart
• Left / Right or J / K: skip backward or forward 5 seconds
• Shift + Left / Right or [ / ]: pan viewport
• Up / Down or + / -: zoom
• 0: fit the whole file
• F: toggle follow-playhead
• L: toggle looping

UI Notes

• The window opens at 1320x860
• Playback position updates every 16 ms
• Follow mode keeps the playhead in view until you manually pan
• Zooming anchors around the mouse cursor when possible
• There is intentionally no file picker, playlist, spectrogram, or editing UI

Supported WAV formats

• PCM 8-bit
• PCM 16-bit
• PCM 24-bit
• PCM 32-bit
• IEEE float 32-bit
• IEEE float 64-bit
• Basic WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE variants that map back to PCM or float