KMix tray popup showing Master (PCM) and two MPRIS2 Media Applications
I am preparing KMix for KDE 4.8, and this means polishing and tying up all the lose ends. Overall I am rather happy – this release looks like a really good one. KMix is heading for stability this time, and in this course I decided to redo my summer coup of closing 69 bugs in one week:
It actually looks so good that I decided to bump KMix to a new major version number KMix v4. This means we are getting closer to the “holy grail” KMix v5.
The new MPRIS2 Backend (see image right) is not active by default. Usually you will use ALSA together with MPRIS2 or Pulseaudio without MPRIS2. See below how to activate ALSA plus MPRIS2 in KMix v4.
killall kmix; sleep 2;
kwriteconfig -file kmixrc -group Global -key Backends -type string ALSA,MPRIS2 ;
sleep 1 ; kmix
KDE Multimedia Mixer 
Posted by koko on December 30, 2011 at 9:21 pm
New KMix with per-application volume control is definetly nice. There’s still few things that I would love to see like Pulseaudio systemwide equalizer and quick output source swapping (and if possible the option to set outputs per application like Headphones for Skype and Speakers for Amarok at the same time). The control applet could be ported to QML/Plasma for better workspace integration and nicer animations.
Thanks.
Posted by BajK on December 30, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Wohoo 🙂 I hope I can make Veromix obsolete soon. (Still hoping for a plasmoid for that though)
Are you planning on extending the PulseAudio features? i.e. dragging around audio streams to assign them to various devices?
I for example have my Speakers and Headphones. I can just drag around the Amarok icon and drop it onto the Speakers and so I get Amarok sound on the Speakers independent of any setting or device attached. (Killer feature of Veromix that I will never want to miss again)
Posted by ianjo on December 30, 2011 at 10:40 pm
I must say that design-wise I think it could still be a bit tweaked (maybe move stuff so that icon and app name are in the same line, and then put volume+controls in the second line), but regardless, thanks a lot for working on kwin, really appreciate it!
Posted by Gianvacca on December 31, 2011 at 12:41 am
You are doing a great job, thanks
Posted by CTown on December 31, 2011 at 1:09 am
Thanks, this is a very important part of Plasma and really needed a bit more polish! And now we can finally change the volume of different programs in KMix!
Posted by Dah65 on December 31, 2011 at 11:12 am
Looks much nicer than before. Good work
Happy 2012 for you and for the rest of the KDE Community
Posted by masteryod on December 31, 2011 at 12:55 pm
nice! but you need to work on look, those button look really awful 😉
Posted by beylix on January 10, 2012 at 8:28 pm
The buttons are the buttons from your selected icon set. They are used in all KDE applications, for example Amarok.
If you don’t like it, you need to exchange your icon set.
Posted by Saris on December 31, 2011 at 5:14 pm
for 4.8 all i get in RC is a kmix with uses 100% CPU 😀
Posted by beylix on January 10, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Yes, 4.8 RC1 had this bug. It is fixed in 4.8 RC2.
Posted by Fri13 on January 1, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Good start for awesome pulseaudio features to allow people easily link input to wanted output and vice versa when having hardware or application as input or output
ps. Your blog (or kubuntu news site) brakes the planetkde look with ugly yellow background.
Posted by beylix on January 10, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Thanks for your comment.
PS: I also have see the yellow background – it seems to be there not for all but only for some of the blog entries. I’d love to hear from experts how to change it.
Posted by El nuevo KMix 4.0 : KDE Blog on January 6, 2012 at 10:03 pm
[…] Segun informa su desarrollador, este último hecho ha sido definitivo para decidir que KMix está lo bastante maduro para saltar de la numeració 3.x a la 4, y así esperamos verlo en KDE 4.8. Más información: KDE Multimedia Mixer […]
Posted by Azerion on January 10, 2012 at 7:21 pm
I executed the commands but not much happened since. Any hints?
Posted by beylix on January 10, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Thanks for the notice, Azerion.
You are right. It looks like the blog software creates a wrong character from two consecutive minus characters, which makes the second line fail. Luckily kwriteconfig also supports the use of single minus characters.
I changed the blog and now it should work.
Posted by Dzikri on January 21, 2012 at 11:20 pm
Great job!
You can always wrap codes with <pre></pre> so WordPress won’t texturize the text.
Posted by xapient on January 26, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Thank you very much.
Did you think about moving to QtQucik / QML for the kmix-widget ?
Posted by beylix on March 16, 2012 at 10:36 pm
No, not at all. Changing technologies is usually a terrible hassle.
I also do not see any advantage in it for KMix. For example it doesn’t make sense to place the KMix GUI on a Smartphone or Tablet. The KMix core (non-GUI) is open for new GUI’s, should a permanent maintainer for a KMix QtQuick GUI step up.
Posted by starbuck on February 3, 2012 at 10:36 pm
Hello,
we built a distro based on kubuntu and experience that Kmix PCM slider is always set to zero right after installation… so you can hear the login sound but no sound for example from vlc or qmmp… a new user doesn’t know its the pcm slider thinks he has no sound at all… any idea what is the cause of this and if this is fixable (in kmix or alsa)?
Posted by beylix on March 16, 2012 at 10:25 pm
There can be dozends of reasons. Alsa driver, Alsa library, Pulseaudio restoring volumes, KMix restoring volumes, Misbehaving applications (e.g. flashplayer used to do nasty things). You need to find the source by excluding applications. If you don’t start KMix (neither kmix NOR kmixctrl !!!), and the problem persists, you have to look elsewhere.
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