Pulseaudio/KDE4 -Knotify bug SOLVED

[viking60]

b1o was right: If you have trouble with your system -deactivate pulseaudio:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232068
This is a bug that I have in KDE4 in Arch after I installed pulseaudio. It will also mute your speakers in Gnome if you log in there after having been in KDE. If you log in to gnome coming from gnome it should be fine.
Not much to be done about it for now as it looks.

[dedanna1029]

Interesting. A bug I haven't encountered yet. I'll watch updates though. Fedora's pulseaudio has been a tad buggy in Gnome, though.

[viking60]

Yep it seems complicated - but I am only so so interested since it only is a problem in KDE in Arch.

[dedanna1029]

Gotcha.

[viking60]

OK this thing was annoying so I decided to spend some calories on removing it. This is a Pulseaudio+KDE+Phonon-gstreamer bug (to be precise )
So I decided to replace my phonon and phonon-gstreamer with phonon-git.

I could not remove it the traditional way due to dependencies so I thought "violence works" and did a pacman -Rd phonon phonon-gstreamer (word my grandmother dislikes dependencies and remove).
That worked but I could not build phonon-git from AUR.
reinstalled phonon and phonon-gstreamer and:

- Back to square one

I then installed phonon-xine.

And that was it No more bug buddy on login or logout.

[dedanna1029]

Oh! So that's why I haven't encountered it still to this day. I had phonon-xine installed the whole time.

[viking60]

Yes that, and that the bug only exists in KDE.

[dedanna1029]

Well, I do run KDE. ... Once in a rare while. ... When I have to. ... For a couple minutes. LOL.

[R_Head]

Help me to understand...

What Pulse Audio is good for?

I use Linux for about 10 years and never had the need for it in the passed 8 or so.

Why all the sudden seems that we need it?

What are the benefits, if any?

[viking60]

Well according to dedanna you need it for mp3player or something (I never got a clear answer from here - or I never understood it ). According to b1o you need it to be able play a game while hearing your opponents in the headphone via skype at the same time or something.
I personally installed it to prove dedanna wrong (or right) in here bug theory.
It might be something about sound on several channels or something.
But your question is good. I will have to leave the answer to the sound freaks in here.

[dedanna1029]

PulseAudio is a Linux sound server that, through abstraction layers, promises a myriad of flexible audio features: combining multiple sound cards into a single, multi-channel device, changing output devices on the fly for running applications, even redirecting input and output between machines over the network. Sadly, though, it is usually used just as a bare-bones drop-in replacement for older, buggier sound servers like ESD -- because that is the most common use case, and because the PulseAudio documentation and tools aren't caught up to the same level as the underlying library. Full PulseAudio nirvana entails digging into the project in depth, but you can at least get your feet wet over the weekend, directing and even multicasting audio between Linux machines on your local network.

http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/33 ... -computers - a really good guide to Pulseaudio.

Since I do have to change output devices quite frequently on the fly (sometimes 2x-3x a day), it's good for me, and is a must. It also sounds better on this system, and I can "fine-tune" the sound much better with it. It's seriously an audiophile's delight.

[R_Head]

I guess it does a lot but seems that I have more audio problems than before.

Perhaps is a matter of time as usual.