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Hi,
I've just switched my main computer to Arch, and I've been setting it up for a while. I'm at the point where I want sound to play - ideally like it did in my previous distro (fedora). I'm really confused as to the sound setup though - I can't really figure out if I need to install pulseaudio, alsa, oss, jack, or something else. The important bit for me is that I really don't want to install a big DE like gnome or KDE - I like my openbox.
What I have right now is just pulseaudio (in rc.conf) and pavucontrol. That kind of works okay for me (sound works, I can run two sound-y programs at once), but I have to run pavucontrol from a terminal whenever I want to change something. As I was installing keytouch to get my special keys (I have an Asus M70 model) working, it occured to me that I don't actually have a command-line program to change volume - because I don't have alsa installed. I have an /etc/asound.conf that mirrors what is recommended on the wiki, but I don't think it really helps because alsa doesn't show up anywhere.
What I want is something like this:
* Multiple programs can play sound (I already have this)
* I can control the master sound volume from the keyboard. I'm not sqeamish about writing shell scripts for this and binding them in arcane methods through keytouch or something, so just getting a CLI interface to my audio would be enough.
* As a bonus, I'd like to have an applet that goes in a pypanel system tray so that I can use that as well.
* As an extra bonus, I'd like to be able to control the volume of each application individually, but this is really icing on the cake.
I've done a lot of Google searching/wiki reading, but what I seemed to get was 'how to enable sounds at all' and 'use gnome/kde'. Any help beyond that (especially reguarding what daemons I should have enable in rc.conf, or for that matter, an explanation of the sound hierarchy on linux) is much appreciated!
Last edited by gaunt (2010-01-17 03:43:23)
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ALSA is the default Linux sound subsystem. It supports software mixing out of the box via dmix. This is what Arch uses by default.
Pulseaudio is a sound server working on top of ALSA, providing some additional features, like per-app volume control. That's what Fedora has been using by default for the past few releases.
OSS3 was a default Linux sound subsystem years ago, OSS4 is an alternative for ALSA which supports per-app volume control, JACK is a sound server used mainly for professional audio.
Getting apps to work properly with pulseaudio is a bit more problematic than with ALSA. You can control the master volume from CLI with alsamixer and amixer (alsa-utils package; you can bind the second one to keyboard's volume keys). There are many different mixer apps/applets available; if you want to stick to pulseaudio, probably the best would be gnome-media-pulse from AUR (it has some minimal GNOME dependencies). I don't know how it looks in openbox, but mixers in KDE/GNOME usually work out of the box with those multimedia keys when X recognizes them properly.
Last edited by lucke (2010-01-17 04:38:04)
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Thanks! That makes everything a lot clearer. I'll go ahead and set up ALSA then.
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