I’ll lose this if I don’t put it here, and since the first installation command returned a complaint (error) from bzr, this is the one that worked (okay, after I’d installed bzr, since I hadn’t had a need for it since I upgraded to Jaunty). The icon is über-ugly, but I can disable its showing in the notification area, so…meh. Now, I just need to add it to my startup script and I’ll be good to go! 🙂

EarCandy is a Smart PulseAudio Volume Manager

[Linux only] EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, but a smart one It will automatically mute your music when a Movie or a YouTube video starts. And will mute the video when a Skype call comes in. You’ll love that !

This is not really a program where you have millions of options to play with. It’s more a zen one: you launch it and forget it. You’ll just remember about it when it automatically kicks in and do what you were about to do out of habit, before you.

I’m embedding here a short screencast of the old version, since I don’t have any newer one available. It will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

(snipped embedded video)

This release is packed with new features, and finally seems very stable. Let’s go over the new features one by one:

• USB Headsets support: if you plug an usb headset, the audio streams will be automatically transferred to the headsets.
• Updates special volume keys to point to the usb headset when it’s plugged in: no more need to mess with the volume applet, the special multimedia keys of your keyboard will work on your audio boxes or usb headset depending if the latter is plugged in or not.
• Volume slider: the tray icon now behaves much more like the standard Gnome volume applet, and displays a volume slider when clicked.
• Deactivable tray icon: …but if you don’t like to have yet another tray icon, you can hide it easily.
• Lock volumes: earcandy automatically determines which audio stream you want to listen. But if you happen to be willing to freeze the current situation, you can do so with the pause button that appears above the slider when you click the tray icon.
• Refactored interface: nicer and more sober.
• Adjustable volume fade speed: I like it fast btw. With fries.

Two more new features:

Smart volume detection

This is pretty cool. The last releases had some problem with YouTube. When Youtube video is paused or finishes, the audio stream is not released by Firefox. That means that viewing a youtube video meant stopping the music forever.

Earcandy now features a nice volume detection. That means that, if you stop a video, the music resumes playing automatically. This is nifty, you really have to try how seamless it makes it to understand what I mean.

Automatic configuration

One issue with EarCandy was the fact you had to configure your application to tell EarCandy which application was a Video player, which one was an Audio player, and so on. EarCandy now sniffs the .desktop files of the open applications, and understands on its own who does what (and you can even override the rules you don’t like)

Sold ?

Since it seems pretty stable right now, I encourage everybody to try it. Open a terminal and type the following:

bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.4 earcandy
cd earcandy
./ear_candy

ps: if you already played with some earlier version of earcandy, remove altogether its settings folder (~/.config/Ear Candy) before running it.

(Original blog post here, but if it “disappears”, as things sometimes do on teh intar-tubes, I still have what I need to know!)