XFCE without Pulseaudio - recommendations?

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

With both xfce4-mixer and xfce4-volumed being removed from the tree, are there any alternatives for us who can't or won't use Pulseaudio to still have mixer functionality and multimedia keyboard support? So far I have put the affected packages in a local overlay but considering the security vulnerabilities I'd rather use a different approach.
The reason I can't use Pulseaudio is because I run multiple chroots on my system that needs audio, as well as running several applications with different userids that also need audio. Pulseaudio could be configured as a system wide service for this but the developers' strong recommendation against this scares the heck out of me.

So what is left? Running Pulseaudio on top of dmix? How would I make this work from within my chroots? Switch to another DE? Suggestions?

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:53 pm Post subject:

xfce-extra/xfce4-alsa-plugin
media-sound/volumeicon
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ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

The mask message also mentions xfce4-alsa-plugin could be a replacement. Otherwise, the bug report mentions retrovol (gtk+:2), or any other mixer should work.

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

Thank you. xfce-extra/xfce4-alsa-plugin only contains a master volume control and no mixer unless I missed something. I don't know about volumeicon since I couldn't figure out how to run it. Nothing shows up on screen when I start it from the command line. Still need some replacement for xfce4-volumed.

alexdu · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 4:39 pm Post subject:

transpetaflops,
volumeicon is working OTB, just check to have "Notification area" on a panel for the icon.
For mixer it calls a new terminal window with, by default, alsamixer.
Example command for use xfce4-term that you could set in "Preferences":