[LAU] KDE 4.4's nice integration of Pulseaudio, ALSA, and JACK!

Niels Mayer nielsmayer at gmail.com
Mon Jun 14 15:31:33 UTC 2010


I found an interesting link on KDE's Pulseaudio integration:

http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/10/so-how-does-the-kde-pulseaudio-support-work-anyway/
..........
So when libphonon is used in an application, a connection to
PulseAudio will be attempted. If that connection fails everything will
work as currently and nothing much changes. If the connection
succeeds, we establish if "module-device-manager" is loaded. This is a
module specifically written to implement the routing policy (an
ordered priority list of devices for each category of sound produced -
e.g. Notifications, Music or Video). If this module is not detected we
offer a reduced/cut-down PulseAudio integration where the user will
only see a single, virtual "PulseAudio" sound "device" listed in the
KDE configuration system's multimedia section. If m-d-m is detected
however, users will get the full rich experience.
...........

QUESTION: How does one tell KDE/phonon to quit looking and attempting
to contact pulseaudio (since I deinstalled pulseaudio). Every time a
KDE audio app is started, there's a lag of 5-10 seconds before the
application even starts as it attempts to contact pulseaudio and then
times out::

gnulem-121-~/Music> amarok
socket(): Address family not supported by protocol
...

For those of us not running pulseaudio, is there an environment
variable or some magic ~/.kde/* setting to tell phonon to quit looking
for pulseaudio? (Or shorten the timeout to zero?). And also, if a
phonon app doesn't find pulseaudio, shouldn't it cache that result
somewhere instead of retrying for the nonexistant server every time
audio needs to be setup? (Is that a bug or a feature?)\

FYI, other than the startup delay, KDE's audio integration is quite
nice. For example, I can tell phonon to send music output to Jack (and
if jack is not running, it then talks to the soundcard directly).

Niels
http://nielsmayer.com


More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list