[pulseaudio-discuss] Sink for event sounds? WAS: paplay - sound roles?

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 00:30 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and Ng Oon-Ee at 28/12/09 23:43 did gyre and gimble:
> > On Mon, 2009-12-28 at 15:45 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> >> On Mon, 28.12.09 17:41, Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee at gmail.com) wrote:
> >>
> >>> Is there a way to specify a sound to be a 'system sound' as defined
> > by
> >>> System Sounds on pavucontrol, when played by paplay?
> >>>
> >>> If so, then programs such as pidgin which allow playing event
> >>> notifications through a command would be useable without
> > modification.
> >>
> >> paplay --property=media.role=event ...
> >>
> >> Lennart
> >>
> > A follow-up on this, how do I move event sounds to a different sink? For
> > other streams I simply use pavucontrol, but it doesn't seem that there's
> > any selector for the "System Sounds" item. It just selects the
> > 'normal' (laptop sound card output) and I can't figure a way to move it
> > to my BT headset without turning the sound card output off.
> 
> I believe that libcanberra always ensures that event sounds are played
> on the default sink. Not sure of the inner workings there nor of whether
> it should be a stream-restore job (it's capable of routing e.g. all
> event sounds to a given sink, overriding (IIRC) the per-application
> device rules.

Hmm, is it then impossible to move event sounds? Doesn't seem like a
good way to do it.

> Incidentally, when playing with pidgin, are you sure paplay is the right
> thing to use... in the absence of direct libcanberra support, could you
> not use "canberra-gtk-play -i message-new-instant" or similar to play
> the relevant sound from the FDO sound theme naming spec[1] when the
> appropriate action occurs. I'd imagine writing a libcanberra plugin for
> purple/pidgin wouldn't be very hard at all... basically just bridging
> code.... (although this is without the benefit of looking at either set
> of APIs in any great depth :p)

canberra-gtk-play doesn't seem to work here, errors out with:-
Failed to play sound: Sound disabled

I've never used it before, and I believe libcanberra on my system may
not even have pulseaudio support compiled in, hence my preference for
paplay (I don't use any gnome event sounds).