KDEPIM3 on KDE 4.10.5 Sound and Icon

[Duncan]

John Woodhouse posted on Tue, 30 Jul 2013 08:36:32 -0700 as excerpted:

> I have found an answer myself. Another notification option is run a
> program so I entered
> 
> cvlc ~soundblaster.wav
> 
> cvlc is vlc run without the graphical interface.
> 
> I have another related question.
> 
> When say dolphin --help is entered into the console all of the option
> available for running dolphin are show. The --help option works on other
> things as well. Must admit I was glad to see this feature as it makes
> bash scripts involving kde nice and easy BUT when I tried phonon --help
> no help at all. In fact there doesn’t seem to be an application called
> phonon and my machine doesn't recognise either alsa or gstreamer as a
> command either.

Those packages are mostly libraries used by other apps, altho they (well, 
at least alsa) do contain some utility apps including console mixers/
players.  See below.

> So is there utility that will allow sounds to be played in the same way
> as cvlc does? The problem with that one is 2 volume controls. I ideally
> need a method that just uses the main desktop vol control.

For alsa there's alsamixer, an ncurses-based console-based mixing app, 
and amixer as the CLI equivilent, along with aplay as the CLI player.  
There's also aplaymidi for playing midi files if your soundcard has a 
hardware synth or timidity as a software synth.

Phonon appears to be all infrastructure, libs and the like, no direct 
front-end players.

I don't have gstreamer installed as years ago it just didn't seem to work 
well for me, and since then I've always found other options so have never 
needed to bother with it.  So I can't tell you what it has.

I also don't use pulseaudio here, but I'd be rather surprised if it 
didn't have a CLI player too.

Meanwhile, there's a whole host of other alternatives.  I believe both 
mplayer (and mplayer2, which is actually what I have installed so I know 
it can) and xine (which I had installed in the past but not now) can be 
driven from the CLI (similar to cvlc) as well as their various GUIs 
(including ncurses, similar to nvlc), and if you have sdl-sound (simple 
direct media layer) installed for games, etc, it has a CLI player called 
playsound, which in fact I used myself back in the kde3 era in place of 
arts, much as you're using cvls at the moment, so I know it works for 
that.

Then there's the various console-based audio players such as mpd, which I 
use here as my primary music player.  Mpd is music player daemon, which 
is what it runs as, a daemon, with all sorts of front-end clients to 
choose from including mpc for CLI, the qt4 based qtmpc and qmpdclient, 
and the ncurses based ncmpc and ncmpcpp.  There's gtk-based front-ends as 
well, a nowplaying-mpd plasmoid for use with kde plasma, even a web-based 
front-end.  What's nice about mpd is that you can control it from 
whatever you want, and it doesn't quit playing if you logout or restart 
kde/X.

Meanwhile, having the ability to play sounds from the CLI is actually a 
pretty common feature for pretty much any music/media/sound player on 
Linux, since once they're playing with or without a GUI, adding the 
necessary CLI switches to allow CLI control is very little additional 
coding.  Since even for a normal GUI-based media player being able to 
control it from the CLI (with or without a display window) is very handy, 
it's the rare app that does NOT implement that feature, tho there's 
certainly some.  (smplayer2, which I generally prefer to vlc as my video 
player, doesn't appear to have a no-window mode, altho the mplayer2 it 
uses as a backend certainly does.)

Based on that, it's likely that the native kde media players kmplayer, 
dragon-player and amarok support no-window CLI controlled playback too, 
tho I don't have them installed to check.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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