whither xfce4-mixer?

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Allin Cottrell <cottrell at wfu.edu> [2013-04-11 18:25]:
> I wonder if anyone is thinking about what to do with xfce4-mixer now
> that gstreamer 1.0 is released, and the old mixer API is gone? The
> prospect is that before too long, as the distros update gstreamer,
> running xfce4-mixer will require a parallel installation of the
> obsolete gstreamer 0.10.
> 
> It's a bother that the mixer API has been removed, but the argument
> is that using gst is not the right way to do this, and that mixers
> should interface directly with ALSA.
> 
> Sorry to be just a consumer -- I'm unlikely to have time to
> contribute patches -- but I'd note that if anyone's thinking of
> working on this, looking at gamix might be useful. It's a perfectly
> good GUI ALSA mixer, except that it uses the long-obsolete GTK 1.2.
> The ALSA interface code might be reusable.

alsa-lib is very low-level and it is Linux-only, so you don't
want to base a mixer directly on it but use some kind of
abstraction layer and once you start doing that you are
reinventing libgstmixer which doesn't make sense.

Note also that until the rewrite for Xfce 4.6 xfce4-mixer did
exactly this, it had its own abstraction layer with different
backends which was quite buggy and actually lacked abstraction,
making it as cluttered as gamix or gnome-alsamixer back in
the day.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster