pulseaudio

[pwatk]

Well, you can make it work with an appropriate ~/.asoundrc (as above) but you lose the ability to mix sound sources (imagine playing a game whilst listening to music) and you have to control all the sound levels within each application or it defaults to 100%.

Pavucontrol still requires you to alter sound levels for each application/plugin but you still have more control and you can mix sound sources.

[thenktor]

Well, you can make it work with an appropriate ~/.asoundrc (as above) but you lose the ability to mix sound sources

Make dmix the default sound interface See this post how I've done this on my PC with my PCI sound card: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=984

[pwatk]

Thanks for the link but I am failing miserably to get this to work .

[pwatk]

...on the other hand I have managed to fix the xfce mixer problem... I needed to build the pulseaudio plugin that was missing from gst-plugins-good.

Scrolling the panel applet doesn't work for my Bluetooth headphones and neither do the hotkeys (via xfce-volumes) but it works from the dialog box.

[pwatk]

Well everywhere I've looked says that PulseAudio is the best solution for bluetooth headphones. I accept that not everyone likes PulseAudio but I'm going to build the required packages for the next major release so there available for me atleast .

The Xfce mixer simply isn't mature enough yet to handle PulseAudio fully and despite Pavucontrol having the most features it lacks a volume applet for the panel. For this reason I rebuilt the gnome-media package to include gnome-volume-control which works like a dream. I doubt anyone will want (or allow) this by default so I'll try to make an add-on package for it, gnome-media-mixer or something.

Finally, xfce-volumed only seams to work for ALSA devices so my hotkey's don't work for my headphones. I've started writing a script that can be used via the keyboard settings (you need to set your key binds manually) to raise, lower and mute the volume of the default sink (you'll notice I've only got mute working at the moment):

Code: Select all

# PulseAudio Hotkey Script
#!/bin/sh
sink="$(pacmd dump | awk '/^set-default-sink/ {print $2}')"
mute="$(pacmd dump | grep "^set-sink-mute $sink" | awk '{print $3}')"
#vol="$(pacmd dump | grep "^set-sink-volume $sink" | awk '{print $3}')"

case $1 in
   mute )
      if [ "$mute" = "no" ]; then
         pacmd set-sink-mute $sink yes
      else
         pacmd set-sink-mute $sink no
      fi
      ;;
   up )
   ;;
   down )
   ;;
   * )
   ;;
esac


-pwatk

[caitlyn]

I'm willing to concede that pulseaudio may be the best solution for Bluetooth, but I have to wonder how many other things would break if it was implemented in SalixOS. I'm with Robin on this one: my experience with pulseaudio has been mixed at best.

[pwatk]

Personally I've never had a problem with it and I don't understand what is so difficult about switching default sound servers and going back to using ALSA directly. May be some other distro's over complicate things.

That said, I agree that I wanted this for a specific reason so it makes sense not to put it on the disc and just keep it in the repository.

[Shador]

Personally I've never had a problem with it and I don't understand what is so difficult about switching default sound servers and going back to using ALSA directly. May be some other distro's over complicate things.

That said, I agree that I wanted this for a specific reason so it makes sense not to put it on the disc and just keep it in the repository.

As far as I can tell from tracking this conversation you needed to rebuild some packages to make it fully work (apart from configuration changes)?
Maybe a separate repository like gnomeslackbuild would be a good idea. Such a repository could be officially supported or just community maintained, but in any case instructions in the wiki how to set up pulseaudio with it should accompany it.

[pwatk]

Good idea but I've created SLKBUILD,s for the gstreamer plugin from gst-plugins-good and the volume control from gnome-media which work independently so there's no need to create a separate repository.

The only other package that might be affected is alsa-plugins but I can separate the pulseaudio plugin just the same if required.

[Shador]

Good idea but I've created SLKBUILD,s for the gstreamer plugin from gst-plugins-good and the volume control from gnome-media which work independently so there's no need to create a separate repository.

The only other package that might be affected is alsa-plugins but I can separate the pulseaudio plugin just the same if required.

I wouldn't mind unless there are some major downsides/conflicts I don't know about/ have missed. So there should be some testing on multiple other systems beforehand.
Any other opinions on that matter?