Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 (and 0.4.1) Released
Stable as a rock. Xfce PulseAudio Plugin hit a new stable milestone with the 0.4.0 release. This release wraps up the awesome development cycle we’ve had on this over the last few months and is recommended for all users.
What’s New?
Since 0.2.5, the previous stable release.
Device Management
- Added support for audio input devices
- Added support for the XF86AudioMicMute key
- Added ability to switch active audio devices and streams
- Simplified audio volume controls
MPRIS2 Integration
- New optional MPRIS2 support (play/pause, raise, track switching, playlists)
- Added multimedia keyboard support, keys control the active media player and add keyboard support for any MPRIS2-enabled player
- Experimental libwnck support adds support for raising windows that do not otherwise support it (Spotify included)
- Players can be selectively hidden from the menu in the preferences dialog
General
- Significant code cleanup, dropping unused IDO support and simplifying widgets
- Improved memory management with numerous memory leaks patched
Translation Updates
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Available on Debian Testing and Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Included in Xubuntu 18.04.
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.5
Activity is slowing down as the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin matures and heads toward the 0.4.0 stable release. With some usability refinements and bug fixes, users will find the latest release both easy and convenient to use.
What’s New?
New Feature: Move Streams on Default Output Change (Xfce #14157)
- Prior to this update, when a new output device was selected from the plugin menu, only newly opened applications would utilize the selected option.
- With this change, any active output streams will immediately be routed to the newly selected device.
New Feature: Management of Known MPRIS2 Players (Xfce #13903)
- Known media players can now be cleared or selectively hidden from the menu.
Bug Fixes
- Correctly reflect the current volume state at session startup (Xfce #14071, #13677)
- Clear stale data retained after a new Metadata signal (Xfce #14068)
Translation Updates
Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Irish, Japanese, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.5 is already included with Xubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Check it out when you test the Beta next week!
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.5 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 25e7bc414edf6e16140c31ca4e7dcedd4e17d40ea23a2921beb799fed11a99bb
- SHA-1: 955268828ac53fdfbfa346fbec376aa4f6199385
- MD5: 30cd40be36895c4ced48c2433ff440c4
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.4
With each new release, the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin becomes more refined and better suited for Xfce users. The latest release adds support for the MPRIS Playlists specification and improves support for Spotify and other media players.
What’s New?
New Feature: MPRIS Playlists Support
- This is a basic implementation of the MediaPlayer2.Playlists specification.
- The 5 most recently played playlists are displayed (if supported by the player). Admittedly, I have not found a player that seems to implement the ordering portion of this specification.
New Feature: Experimental libwnck Support
- libwnck is a window management library. This feature adds the “Raise” method for media players that do not support it, allowing the user to display the application window after clicking the menu item in the plugin.
- Spotify for Linux is the only media player that I have found which does not implement this method. Since this is the media player I use most of the time, this was an important issue for me to resolve.
General
- Unexpected error messages sent via DBUS are now handled gracefully. The previous release of Pithos (1.1.2) displayed a Python error when doing DBUS queries before, crashing the plugin.
- Numerous memory leaks were patched.
Translation Updates
Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.4 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 43fa39400eccab1f3980064f42dde76f5cf4546a6ea0a5dc5c4c5b9ed2a01220
- SHA-1: 171f49ef0ffd1e4a65ba0a08f656c265a3d19108
- MD5: 05633b8776dd3dcd4cda8580613644c3
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3
Development on the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin has been moving along at a steady pace, and the latest release marks the completion of another great feature for the Sound Indicator replacement applet.
What’s New?
New Feature: Multimedia Key Support
Multimedia keyboard support has been hit and miss in the Linux space for as long as there’s been multimedia keyboards. Support for these keys has been entirely dependent on support baked into each individual application. The best current example of this is the Spotify Linux client. Users can control the media player with various panel plugins, but not with their keyboards.
With the new multimedia key support in Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3, the recently added MPRIS2 integration has been complemented with key bindings for the Play/Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop keys. When these keys are pressed, any actively running player known to the plugin will be notified, enabling keyboard playback control.
You can check out the new feature in the video below, where I very excitedly inundate my media players with playback commands.
General Improvements
- Simplified device menus: The bold section headers have been replaced in favor of a single menu per input and output device. If there’s only one option available, the menu is no longer displayed.
- Improved volume scale increments: The old defaults were steps of 6% and a max of 153%. These seemed a bit unusual, and have been replaced with a more sensible 5% and 150%.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed builds with clang (Xfce #13889) (0.3.2)
- Fixed panel icon size with high DPI (Xfce #13894) (0.3.2)
- Show volume change notifications when changed with another application (Xfce #13677)
- Change default device when changed with another application (Xfce #13908)
- Fixed flag in g_bus_watch_name_on_connection() method (Xfce #13961)
- Fix plugin size calculation with multiple rows (Xfce #13998)
Translation Updates
Chinese (China), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Ukrainian
Demo
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.3 from the below link.
- SHA-256: d6aae9409714c5ddea975c350b4d517e078a5550190165b17ca062d0eb69f9a6
- SHA-1: 5921f7c17b96dda09f035e546e06945f40398dc9
- MD5: d3d3e012369af6d2302d4b70a7720a17
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.1
A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.
Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin
This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.
Features
- Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond
- Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle
- Launch the configured audio mixer
- Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)
- Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)
Screenshots
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 61a39f892e5e06723a08f919682362ebaf54792ed1076f5be828d0209a52f482
- SHA-1: 6db0e12f5f171bd57b1330c7996d503aca7a4883
- MD5: ab2a12283555db063db3abea26b3237e
Looking for new maintainers for some of my projects
I am looking for a new maintainer for some of the open source projects I started over the last couple of years. Due to taking a full-time position as a software engineer, I will have less spare time to hack in the near future than I had while being a student. I will continue contributing to Xfce but I would like to focus on core development (thunar, tumbler, garcon etc.). As a consequence, I am looking for people interested in maintaining the following projects:
- thunar-media-tags-plugin
- xfce4-verve-plugin
- xfce4-mixer
- xfce4-time-out-plugin
- jptemplate (see http://lunar-linux.org/~jannis/jptemplate/ for documentation)
Most of these are smaller projects but some of them (like thunar-media-tags-plugin and xfce4-mixer) have many users. xfce4-mixer is particularly interesting, I think. It’s code base is of medium size and it lacks integration with notification daemons, key bindings for muting and altering the volume of a selected channel. Also, the per-channel widgets could be arranged in better ways than they are right now. PulseAudio support has been requested several times but that is an entirely different story. xfce4-mixer is mainly intended as a mixer for GStreamer. A PulseAudio mixer would better be written from scratch. But if anyone is up for the task - why not!
If you are interested in maintaining any of the above (yes, you are free to rename jptemplate to something that does not carry my initials!), please let me know in a comment or send a mail to xfce4-dev@xfce.org!
(You will need knowledge of C, GLib and GTK+ for the Xfce projects and VIM script for jptemplate. But in particular panel plugins are really simple, so the code base should be easy to understand even for a GTK+ newbie who is willing to read API manuals.)