Yeah the problem you are encountering is Ubuntu being dumb. They have patched their libcanberra package in such a way that it breaks the Sound Theme Specification. I have mentioned this to them several times and even publicly in the libcanberra development mailing list.http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.libcanberra.general/199

It actually took me a good couple hours of debugging with an Ubuntu user to work this out. It’s very annoying when downstream distros break things so recklessly and cause us upstream people problems like this.

Anyway, make sure you have both the Ubuntu and FreeDesktop sound themes installed and things *might* work. Otherwise file a bug report in Ubuntu (high priority please) and complain about their reckless, patch-happy approach that breaks things and ask them to issue an update ASAP

If you can’t get it working, come find me on IRC and we can work out what is needed (I know the other user I spoke with got it working, but I forget the exact steps).

All the best!

i wanted to ask, i’m trying to get this working, i’m using kde 4.6.2 under Ubuntu 10.10 and there’s no way i can click on the “Front left”, “Front right”, etc buttons, and have the system play *any* sound… the sound works well though, i can play music with Amarok, etc.

I installed all the libcanberra packages i could find, but it won’t work. Can you give me some pointers on what to do ?

dunno if it helps, but i’m using the Gstreamer phonon backend, and i have all gstreamer-plugin-* packages installed.

thanks a lot.

One thing that always seems missing in these dialogs is the input side. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tab for microphone setup as well? Lot’s of times I wonder if my input is working and need to fall back to trying to record samples with audio recording apps, some of which are so comlpex that I don’t know if the fault is with the hardware or with me just not understanding the options

A dialog like the one you made would be perfect. As an example would server the typical sound setup dialogs with programs like Skype where you can see a meter showing if anything is being recorded and the ability to listen back to it.

I’ve not really got a schedule for this, but if no-one else does it first, I’ll get round to it eventually.

Will there be any support for rewiring different channels? That is one thing there is still no GUI for of any sort that I have seen.

So for instance I have 2 2.1 speakers and 2 1.0 speakers. I use it as a 5.1 speaker setup, but this requires re-routing the various channels on my sound card as so:
Left-front and LFE -> Left Front
Right-front and LFE -> Right-front
Left-rear -> Left-rear
Right-rear -> Right-rear
Center and LFE -> Center
Center and LFE -> LFE

There is no GUI for this that I know of. It should be possible to do, you would need a list of output channels, and then have a drop-down list where you could select the input channel and the volume of that channel, and probably a +/- button for adding input channels to each output channel. It might also be needed to set it individually for 2 channel, 4 channel, 6 channel, and 8 channel inputs.

This would also be really useful for people with surround sound systems running stereo inputs who want to, for instance, route Left to Left-front and left-rear, right to right-front and right-rear, and both to center/LFE.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245741