Media

Two keys under [media] change what the Media Surface draws beside a playing track.

Key	Type	Default	Notes
media.visualizer	bars | wave | dots | audio | off	bars	audio follows what the default sink plays, read through cava; off draws nothing
media.lyrics	off | local | lrclib	off	local reads a .lrc beside a local track; lrclib also asks LRCLIB

[media]
visualizer = "audio"
lyrics = "lrclib"

bars, wave and dots connect to real audio frequencies through cava when it is available, falling back to synthetic motion when cava is absent or initializing. Cava reads the sink’s monitor, never a microphone, so the privacy indicator does not light; Kanade gives it its own config, so ~/.config/cava/config never applies.

lrclib sends the playing track’s title, artist, album and length to LRCLIB over https with a Kanade/<version> User-Agent and nothing else, only while a track plays and the Media Surface is open. Answers are cached under hashed names in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/kanade/lyrics, at most 200, and a miss is believed for 2 hours.

Note

Synced lyrics show on the Media Surface only, not on the Island’s Peek. A streaming player gives no file, so only lrclib can serve it, and only when it reports an album and a length.

See also

The Media Surface, CLI media and capture, and Media and UI.