Xfce4-mixer pulseaudio support

[Jérôme Guelfucci]

On 01/07/12 16:08, Brandon Watkins wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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
>

Hi,

Lionel Le Folgoc "forked" xfce4-volumed to replace gstreamer with direct 
libpulse usage for pulseaudio integration, his work is available here: 
http://lionel.lefolgoc.net/code/xfce4-volumed-pulse/

Maybe this can be helpful in some way.

Jérôme Guelfucci