Sound faults in Version 2.3.0 w/ Debian Squeeze

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Brian Morrison at 29/03/10 13:59 did gyre and gimble:
> On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:51:22 +0100
> Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 
>> Most distros I know have been shipping the snapshots of phonon for the
>> last couple releases.
> 
> OOI, what are the recommended versions at present? Fedora is using
> 4.3.80, so should it really use later snapshots than that to ensure
> correct function?

This version does include the necessary stuff IIRC, but there is a bug
in that version that exposed some issues in other programs (e.g.
okular)... https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228324

I've fixed that in git some time ago (and pushed a relatively minor
cosmetic followup last night), but I'm pretty certain that the RH
versions include that fix as I collaborated with Rex when testing the
fix and he's the one who packages phonon in RH :)

> Amarok 2.3.0 is working well for me, but I think I'm using the Xine
> backend. I'm wondering whether there is any benefit to switching to the
> phonon stuff, although F12 does have the phonon-backend packages for
> both -gstreamer and -xine.

I presume you mean "pulseaudio stuff" above? If so, the way I've
integrated PA support into phonon is not as a specific backend but to
make both the gstreamer and xine (and now vlc too) backends aware of
pulseaudio and obtain nice device listings and hand over device priority
preferences to the pulseaudio layer. The benefit of this is that these
preference apply to all sound producing applications, not just
phonon-aware ones - which solves the problem of people complaining that
the default devices they set in System Settings do not apply to e.g.
Xmms, Rhythmbox et al.

So, ultimately you still use either gstreamer, xine or vlc backends to
phonon, it's just that the hooks to make each of them PA aware are now
present, making the device listings nicer and global to all apps.

If you are interested in the finer details, you can read more about it here:
http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/10/so-how-does-the-kde-pulseaudio-support-work-anyway/


I'm also going to very shortly release support for per-application
volume control in phonon using PA, allowing kmix to show you a slider
for Amarok and other phonon/PA applications and have the volume
correctly controlled via a central GUI.

While it still needs some polishing, it's quite promising so far :)

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
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Open Source:
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  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
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