Thanks Lennart for the response. It took a few hours staring sideways at the API and a 'little' help from tanuk on the irc channel for me to see the path to the solution. Works perfectly now. All the best, Conor <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 3:49 AM, Lennart Poettering <<a href="mailto:lennart@poettering.net">lennart@poettering.net</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Tue, 13.10.09 13:38, Forwind info (<a href="mailto:forward@forwind.net">forward@forwind.net</a>) wrote: Heya, <div class="im"> > At the moment I am trying to write a simple gtk application which in essence > can detect this scenario : > > 'master' volume is muted. And at the same time a client application is > attempting to play audio. > > I have been digging through the API and I can't find anything obvious about > the master volume. </div>You should subescribe to sink changes with pa_context_subscribe(). Then you need to enumerate the output sinks with pa_context_get_sink_info_list(). Look for pa_sink_info::mute and pa_sink_info::cvolume for the current mute state and the volume. Use pa_cvolume_is_muted() on pa_sink_info::cvolume to easily check if all channels of the volume are set to muted. i.e. something like this: muted = si->muted || pa_cvolume_is_muted(&si->cvolume); Then, wehn you get a subscription event simply ask for an update of the pa_sink_info for that sink via pa_context_get_sink_info_by_index(). That way you will be able to follow the mute status of all audio sinks (aka "output devices"). Now if you also want to track the streams connecting to them you do basically the same for the sink inputs (aka "output streams"). The logic is very similar for that. If you want to know which sink input (i.e. stream) connects to which sink (i.e. output device) then compare pa_sink_input::sink and pa_sink::index. Hope this is not too confusing. <div class="im"> > I am using the Glib asynchronous api. So far I can query the server about > the number channels and their respective volumes but I cannot query the > overall master volume. </div>There is no overall master volume, because we distinguish different devices. The best you can get is the volume of each sink seperately. <div class="im"> > I thought it would be a case of setting up a callback whereby any channel > attempting to play a stream would notify a custom call back which would then > check if all channels are muted and then notify the GUI accordingly. > > another idea was to use PA_STREAM_START_MUTED. Connect to all streams and on > a playback event check if any has this stream state ? clutching at straws to > be honest. long time since I toyed with C API's. </div>No need to bother with that flag. The introspection APIs should offer all you need. Hope this helps! Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net <a href="http://0pointer.net/lennart/" target="_blank">http://0pointer.net/lennart/</a> GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 _______________________________________________ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list <a href="mailto:pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de">pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de</a> <a href="https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss" target="_blank">https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss</a> </blockquote></div>