Bug 1045742

Summary: mate-volume-control does not allow switching of primary audio device
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Steffen Mikkelsen <smikkelsendk>
Component: mate-mediaAssignee: Dan Mashal <dan.mashal>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 20CC: bugzilla, dan.mashal, fedora, rdieter, shawnbon206, stefano, the.changing.side
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Hardware: All   
OS: Unspecified   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2013-12-22 22:13:25 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Steffen Mikkelsen 2013-12-21 16:53:56 UTC
Description of problem:
mate-volume-control does not allow switching of primary audio device.
Sometimes i attach an external USB microphone to my computer to be used by Skype.
However in mate-volumne-control its impossible to change primary recording device from build-in to usb microphone. This is however possible in pavucontrol. 

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
20

How reproducible:
always

Solution.
As mentioned at https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-media/issues/23 , the problem is that the volume control package has been build with gstreamer support rather than pulseaudio support. 

Change build options to:
%configure \
        --disable-static \
        --enable-gstmix \ # This should be disabled
        --disable-schemas-compile \
        --disable-scrollkeeper \
        --enable-gst-mixer-applet \ # This should be disabled
        --enable-pulseaudio

And this should fix the problem

Comment 1 Wolfgang Ulbrich 2013-12-22 22:13:25 UTC
Sorry, i can't follow your suggestion.
mate-media in fedora is compiled with pulsaudio (--enable-pulseaudio)
Disabling (--enable-gst-mixer-applet) breaks support for users who don't use pulseaudio. There are a lot who think pulseaudio is a mess like me ;)
Ie. slow dvb-t chanel switching in kaffeine, only one big issue with pulseaudio.
And a lot of other probs if you don't use a notebook with simply stereo sound.
Last but not least Lenart Portering works more on systemd as on pulsaudio, so pulseaudio is a bit unmaintained.
You did mentioned that you can switch the sound card with pavucontrol, so i think you have a possibility to choose you sound device you want to use.

Comment 2 David Mansfield 2014-03-17 21:00:30 UTC
I followed some links from other forums to this: the problem is that mate-volume-control is NOT coming up with the "pulseaudio" mixer, it's coming up with the "gst" mixer. I'm on fedora 20 with all updates.  This has been true since I started using MATE on F18 or so.

The page describing the problem is linked above in the description.

The command "mate-volume-control" brings up the the "gst" mixer (says ALSA mixer in the title bar) and not the pulse one.

Both screenshots are seen in that link.

I can run pavucontrol, and it works perfectly - I'm certainly using pulseaudio.

Any ideas?

Comment 4 Alad Wenter 2014-05-06 09:20:57 UTC
Pavucontrol can't actually set the default sound card:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/DefaultDevice/

Why not have two packages, mate-media-gstreamer and mate-media-pulseaudio like in Debian and Arch?

Comment 5 shawnbon206 2014-05-28 01:37:10 UTC
Is it safe to install mate-media-1.8.0-1.fc21 or mate-media-1.7.90-1.fc21 on f20? Or should I be trying to backport the patch in Comment #3 to 1.6?

Best regards,

Shawn

Comment 6 Wolfgang Ulbrich 2014-05-28 13:46:14 UTC
(In reply to shawnbon206 from comment #5)
> Is it safe to install mate-media-1.8.0-1.fc21 or mate-media-1.7.90-1.fc21 on
> f20? Or should I be trying to backport the patch in Comment #3 to 1.6?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Shawn

No, mate-media from f21 expected mate-desktop-1.8.x
You can try to rebuild mate-media with that configure options
--disable-static \
--disable-schemas-compile \
--with-gtk=2.0 \
--enable-pulseaudio
Note, file section in spec file needs also adjust.