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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 05/01/10 14:49 did gyre and gimble:
> On Tue, 29.12.09 08:44, Ng Oon-Ee (ngoonee at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
>>>> 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.
> 
> You can. Event sounds are streams like any other. Given how short they
> are it might be hard to be quick enough though to move them.

Well event sounds are now hidden in pavucontrol.... so moving is
tricky... cmd line tools are hard to use for this when time is of the
essence!

>>> 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
> 
> If you disable event sounds you don't get event sounds. Surprise, surprise!

I do actually get the same problem at times.... not sure what triggers
it, but half way through a session canberra-gtk-play will start bombing
out with that same error.

I've been meaning to look into why canberra believes them to be
disabled... My initial stab in the dark is some sort of gconf borkage,
but not sure.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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