peerspeak/README.md

PeerSpeak

Decentralized, peer-to-peer voice chat — full-mesh, NAT-traversing, with no central server. Built in Rust on iroh (QUIC), PipeWire audio, the Opus codec, and an iced GUI.

Create a room, share the join ticket, and talk. Everyone connects directly to everyone else; relays are only used to punch through NATs when a direct path isn't available.

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Screenshots

Launch screen	In a room

Settings

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Features

Rooms & sessions

• Create a room → shareable join ticket; join by pasting a ticket.
• Full-mesh multi-peer rooms with live presence.
• Recent-rooms list to hop back into a room someone's still in.
• Remembered nickname and in-call duration timer.

Audio

• PipeWire capture/playback, selectable input and output devices, per-app gain.
• Opus codec (48 kHz mono, 20 ms frames) with an adaptive jitter buffer + packet-loss concealment.
• Noise gate with a draggable threshold on a live mic meter (test your mic off-call too).
• Mix-bus soft limiter and opt-in echo cancellation (PipeWire WebRTC AEC + noise suppression).

Voice controls

• Self-mute, deafen, and rebindable push-to-talk.
• Per-peer volume, local mute, and speaking indicators.

Text chat

• In-room text chat over the gossip plane, with clickable links and inline image/audio attachments.
• Drag-selectable, copyable messages; right-click context menu on all text fields.

Shared music listening

• Build a personal playlist of local audio files with a full transport (play/pause, seek, reorder).
• Let others tune in: peers stream your current track, timeline-synced and gapless, sitting under voice at their own volume.

Screen share (via pixelpass)

• Share your screen; peers click 👁 Watch to open the stream in mpv (vlc fallback).
• Live badges on sharing peers; per-app audio capture.

Recording & notifications

• Local call recording (mic + incoming mix → WAV in ~/peerspeak-recordings/).
• Desktop notifications and event chimes with per-event custom sound overrides.

UI & networking

• Selectable room layouts (3-Column, Bottom Dock, Drawer) with draggable, persisted dividers.
• 10 built-in themes (Catppuccin, Dracula, Nord, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Solarized…), all WCAG-AA checked.
• Network mode picker (relay-no-discovery default, full n0, or direct-only); retained-address reconnect.
• Config, window size/position, and all preferences persisted to ~/.config/peerspeak/.

See docs/FEATURES.md for the full inventory and field-test status, and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for internals.

Roadmap

• Contacts & invites — friends list with invite-notification one-click join (design in docs/contacts-plan.md).
• Spatial audio & per-peer EQ.
• Soundboard — play short clips into the call mix.
• Room persistence / invite links beyond the raw ticket.
• Windows support — cross-compiles and launches under Wine today; needs a real WASAPI audio pass (see docs/WINDOWS.md).

Building

PeerSpeak builds with a stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024). Install the system dependencies below, then:

cargo build --release
./target/release/peerspeak

System dependencies

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S --needed rust pipewire opus pkgconf git

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config clang libclang-dev \
  libpipewire-0.3-dev libopus-dev libasound2-dev libxcb1-dev

Plus a Rust toolchain via rustup. clang/libclang are needed for the PipeWire bindings (bindgen).

At runtime you need a running PipeWire server. Screen sharing additionally requires pixelpass on your PATH, and mpv (or vlc) to watch a peer's share.

Packaging

• Arch: cd packaging && makepkg -si (uses packaging/PKGBUILD).
• Debian/Ubuntu: .deb is built with cargo-deb from the [package.metadata.deb] block in Cargo.toml. Build inside a Debian/Ubuntu environment so the binary links that distro's glibc.
• Windows: see docs/WINDOWS.md.

License

PeerSpeak is licensed under the MIT License, © 2026 mollusk.

Third-party components bundled with PeerSpeak (the Rust dependency tree, the statically bundled Opus codec on some builds, and embedded fonts) are all under permissive licenses; their texts and a full dependency manifest are collected in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.