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Slide around the sound
http://colin.guthr.ie/2010/04/slide-around-the-sound/

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Just a quick update on various KDE+PulseAudio changes I've made
recently. This is more of an update from previous articles than anything
ground breaking in it's own right although there is a nifty (IMO) new
feature now available.

... it is possible to listen to changes from PulseAudio and then emit
the relevant Phonon signal to let applications know the volume has
changed. This allows volumes changed in a PulseAudio mixer (pavucontrol
and now KMix too!) to be reflected in the Application GUI (should it
present it to the user).
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OK, so what's that all about?!

Well, PulseAudio 'sits on top of' the ALSA sound system that then pumps
the noise out of your PC sound card. The idea of PulseAudio is
beautifully flexible but also in my mind frightfully complicated. So
much so that using it can give unexpected results, until you learn what
it does.

So, good for flexibility but not so good for being 'friendly' to the
casual user.

Well, the little addition enthused about in the blog adds another good
step of integration whereby an application playing music (such as Amarok
or whatever) can control the music volume and have that control echoed
by the PulseAudio mixer display. Also, the PulseAudio mixer volume is
echoed back to the application. Nice two-way control and improved user
interface integration.

Whether you twiddle the volume on one of the mixer applications or your
actual player application, *all* the volume controls controlling that
audio stream follow each other to show the actual volume being played
for that player application. No more hunting through the chain of sound
connections trying to find the 'missing' muted volume control for your
lost sounds!


The complicated bit is:

PulseAudio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

A pretty diagram is given on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pulseaudio-diagram.svg



For me, it just all sounds good!

:-)

Cheers,
Martin


-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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