Has anyone used a volume/vu meter in a widget? 

Just to show the volume level? 

I do not know if you know it, but by hovering over the volume icon you can get the volume level and on all of my layouts, you can scroll the icon up or down to change the volume...

Yea, I know about that.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm asking about a meter that changes with the sound level.  Something like the bottom bar in this picture.


There is the Visual widget that can do this kind of things, it allows you to use one of the Visualization-class gstreamer plugins, though I'm not sure there is a gstreamer  visualization plugin that only shows the sound level.
The Visual widget only works with gstreamer, and, as a few other things using gstreamer, is not very stable, due to a perl-glib bug concerning foreign threads (threads that have been created by gstreamer itself), there is a mostly working patch in bugzilla, hopefully it will be completed soon.

Thinking about it, it might be possible to simply ask gstreamer for the current sound level, and then simply draw something with it. Though I'm not sure how fluid it would be.


@ackernan

Based on the suggestion from Quentin, I will take a look at a conky lua function to try to do a VU meter..

Okey dokey, thanks for the help.