[pulseaudio-discuss] a little suggestion: start/stop button in pa manager GUI

[H.S.]

Colin Guthrie wrote:

> It would be interesting to see what kind of system you would find easier 
> just now? There are two working groups in Fedora and Ubuntu that are 
> working on making the UI better so please get involved. Not sure how 
> much inter-group-communication there is tho'.

Interesting. As I mentioned earlier, I using Debian. I can work a bit to
try to see this on Ubuntu Intrepid (if the GUI is available there), but
I do not have any Fedora machine nearby. Any idea which of these two GUI
schools of thought have been adopted in Debian?


> It can also be done via pactl on the command line but it's very convoluted.

I gather pactl is the command line interface to pa(?) I am yet to see a
better easier ncurses interface than alsa's! Such an interface goes a
long way in debugging audio problem over the network. I just have to ssh
to a machine to see what is going on regarding an audio problem. Usually
a terminal is all that is needed in alsa. With a GUI control, on the
other hand ... well you see what kind of inconveniences that could lead to.


> Unless I've misinterpreted your "heck of a job" as being praise rather 
> than criticism ;)

No, it was meant as a praise. I was under the impression that the
context of my op would have been enough to clarify that -- however, I
missed a word, I had meant to write "one heck of a job". I keep
demonstrating to my friends that I can change the sink of any
application on the fly (cannot seem to do that with Youtube running in
Firefox though). Pretty neat!


>>> This is just putting wallpaper over the cracks rather than underpinning 
>>> the subsidence! It would be much better to find out *why* you need to 
>>> restart pulseaudio and solve that problem instead.
>> For now it has been only in the instances where some applications do not
>> work properly with pulseaudio.
> 
> Have you tried with the latest alsa-plugins from 1.0.18? They are nicer 
> than before.

hmm ... this is what I have installed:
$> COLUMNS=140 dpkg -l *alsa* *pulseau* | grep ^i | gawk '{print $2 "  "
$3}'
alsa-base  1.0.17.dfsg-4
alsa-oss  1.0.15-1
alsa-utils  1.0.16-2
gstreamer0.10-alsa  0.10.19-2
gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio  0.9.7-2
libesd-alsa0  0.2.36-3
libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa  1.10.10-2
libsdl1.2debian-alsa  1.2.13-2
libsox-fmt-alsa  14.0.1-2+b1
pulseaudio  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-esound-compat  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-module-gconf  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-module-hal  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-module-x11  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf  0.9.10-3
pulseaudio-utils  0.9.10-3

Don't think I have that 1.0.18 alsa plugin though.

> 
> For apps that don't like pulse I'd recommend using pasuspender

Interesting. I will this a shot.


> 
> I dunno, perhaps others folk agree with you but I'd rather have pulse 
> just work in the background. I don't even want to know it's running 
> really provided everything works. This isn't possible right now but it 
> eventually will :)
> 
> Putting in a "Restart 'cause you broke" is rather demotivating but 
> perhaps it is user friendly until such times as it's never needed :)

Exactly my thoughts. For people familiar with command line, it may not
be such a big deal. But if one looks at it from other non-expert
computer users' point of view (mostly using Ubuntu), such a feature
would be of tremendous help.

Plus, I do not think it will be demotivational in any way, it would
serve the purpose of a "reset" button.

Moreover, I would phrase that differently: "Start/Stop Pulseaudio"
perhaps, or "Restart Pulseaudio".

Regards.


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