Xfce4-mixer pulseaudio support

[Brandon Watkins]

Yeah, that does sound like a pretty nice solution, as the gnome volume
applet already has a all the needed functionality, and the only real
problem with it right now is the fact that it needs so many gnome
dependencies. The gnome applet also has a enough features that it would
eliminate the need for pavucontrol. I'm not a developer so I have no idea
how much work that would entail though.

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Guido Berhoerster <gber at opensuse.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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