Xfce4-mixer pulseaudio support

[Guido Berhoerster]

On 01.07.2012 02:25, Brandon Watkins wrote:
> Let me begin with saying that through the developers' hard work, XFCE has
> grown into a very complete desktop, especially considering how lightweight
> and fast it is. I've recently switched from gnome, and XFCE is a great
> change of scenery. Certainly a desktop that deserves more popularity and
> manpower :)
>
> The one weak point I found on the XFCE desktop was the volume mixer. On a
> system using pulseaudio it just doesn't work well at all, and there really
> aren't any good alternative applets (The only one I found that had good
> pulseaudio support was pnmixer, but its buggy and doesn't seem to be under
> active development anymore).
>
> I've managed to workaround most of the mixer's pulseaudio shortcomings
> (setting both the mixer and the applet to use the default pulseaudio output
> makes it show the correct volume in the panel most of the time), set
> pavucontrol to launch on left click, and for volume hotkeys I was able to
> use the cli program "pulsemix" as an alternative to xfce4-volumed (which
> didn't work well with pulse at all) and map its pause/mute toggle/prev/next
> commands to xfce's keyboard settings.
>
> However even though these workarounds can overcome most of the
> shortcomings, there are still some issues. For example, If I am using the
> HDMI output on my laptop, the panel applet stops reflecting the correct
> volume, until I go in and change sound card again in the applet and mixer
> settings.
>
> Is this something that is planned for a future version? I think having a
> mixer that supports pulseaudio would make things so much easier for users
> that want to use XFCE and pulseaudio, but not use the gnome volume applet
> which pulls in tons of gnome dependencies.

AFAIK xfce4-mixer is currently not actively maintained (though I have 
collected a bunch of fixes and features I'd like to contribute soon).
The problem also lies mainly with the gstreamer pulseaudio backend which 
does not expose the necessary functionality. Adding native pulseaudio 
support to xfce4-mixer is IMO neither viable not desirable since the 
code is rather closely tied to gstreamer.
A more viable approach would be to start a new project which is probably 
also not as hard as it sounds since you could just fork off the 
gnome-volume-control code from gnome-control-center and turn it into a 
non-GNOME dependent standalone mixer and tray applet with few adaptations.

-- 
Guido Berhoerster