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

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 14:56 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> '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!

My initial email was primarily to do with pavucontrol and the lack of a
method to move event sounds which is analogous to moving sounds from
apps. The method currently is to set a default sink, but since this
differs from how other app sounds work, its confusing (for me at least)
and bears looking at. Purely a usability issue.

> >>> 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
>