EarCandy 0.4 is out!

You might remember me blogging about EarCandy. Jason Taylor, the creator of EarCandy, has announced that a new release of EarCandy is out and it looks fantastic! Stefano Forenza has written an in depth blogpost, which I've posted below:

EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, but a smart one ! It will automatically mute your music when a Movie or a YouTube video starts. And will mute the video when a Skype call comes in. You’ll love that ! (I already do)

This is not really a program where you have millions of options to play with. It’s more a zen one: you launch it and forget it. You’ll just remember about it when it automatically kicks in and do what you were about to do out of habit, before you.

This release is packed with new features, and finally seems very stable. Let’s go over the new features one by one:

* USB Headsets support: if you plug an usb headset, the audio streams will be automatically transferred to the headsets.
* Updates special volume keys to point to the usb headset when it’s plugged in: no more need to mess with the volume applet, the special multimedia keys of your keyboard will work on your audio boxes or usb headset depending if the latter is plugged in or not.
* Volume slider: the tray icon now behaves much more like the standard Gnome volume applet, and displays a volume slider when clicked.
* Deactivable tray icon: …but if you don’t like to have yet another tray icon, you can hide it easily.
* Lock volumes: earcandy automatically determines which audio stream you want to listen. But if you happen to be willing to freeze the current situation, you can do so with the pause button that appears above the slider when you click the tray icon.
* Refactored interface: nicer and more sober.
* Adjustable volume fade speed: I like it fast btw. With fries.

Two more new features:
Smart volume detection
This is pretty cool. The last releases had some problem with YouTube. When Youtube video is paused or finishes, the audio stream is not released by Firefox. That means that viewing a youtube video meant stopping the music forever.

Earcandy now features a nice volume detection. That means that, if you stop a video, the music resumes playing automatically. This is nifty, you really have to try how seamless it makes it to understand what I mean.

Automatic configuration
One issue with EarCandy was the fact you had to configure your application to tell EarCandy which application was a Video player, which one was an Audio player, and so on. EarCandy now sniffs the .desktop files of the open applications, and understands on its own who does what (and you can even override the rules you don’t like)


In case you don’t like the predefined rules, you can change them in the Preferences.

Advanced preferences.

Sold?
UPDATE! Ear Candy .deb and PPA Available !

Since it seems pretty stable right now, I encourage everybody to try it. Open a terminal and type the following:

bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.4 earcandycd earcandy./ear_candy

ps: if you already played with some earlier version of earcandy, remove altogether its settings folder (~/.config/Ear Candy)before running it

Help needeeeeed!
If you’re good at packaging, why don’t you give it a shot and make a nice .deb (an .rpm would be also appreciated). If so, comment here.

Also, if someone may contribute a better, high resolution icon… no offense to Jason but icons are not really his specialty. If so, please open a new bug

Opinions?
Like always, please let me know what you think about it.

I really love how it lifts the burden of stopping an resuming audios, videos, etc from my shoulders. All considered, EarCandy adds a really little touch inside the landscape of the desktop experience, but a very nice one, and I’d go even further saying that would be so cool to have this included in Karmic Koala by default. Now, that surely won’t happen, but if it would, I’m sure it would be noticed and appreciated by the people.

Source: http://www.stefanoforenza.com/earcandy-04-rules/

Speaker Review: Bose Companion 2

So I was looking for a new set of small speakers to replace my old setup which had an hifi amplifier and hifi speakers.
The things the where most important to me was:

- Great sound
- Small
- No subwoofer
- Robust hardware

Logitech Z-10
There were to sets that I especially looked at; BOSE Companion 2 Series II and Logitech Z-10. The Logitech Z-10 speakers sounded excellent, looked very slick and had a display that showed song title, volume and etc., but needed a driver installed to work properly. There were a few forum posts that described how to get Z-10 working on Linux. With problems like having no sound (hard to ignore that one!) or display not working, I quickly decide I wanted something less futuristic (and something that works out-of-the-box). On the front-panel there were over ten touch-buttons that I felt didn't really emphasize robust hardware, as I was looking for.


BOSE Companion 2 Series II
The BOSE Companion 2 Series II was the ones I ended up buying. The speakers are smaller than the Z-10 and has only one knob on the front for volume. The sound is great (though the bass can be a little indistinct at times) and (a big plus for me) there's a headphone jacks on the front. One thing I don't like is the power switch - or, more specifically, the absence of one. I have no idea how much power they use in "stand-by" mode, but a real switch would be nice. I will have to get a USB Power Strip. They also have dual RCA inputs which lets you connect your computer and iPod at the same time, so you don't have to fiddle about with wires when you want to change audio source. They don't make any noise when they're not playing, so you completely forget that they always are turned on.
The Bose Companion 2 Series 2 speakers are really really good and has a lot to offer, but they're not the absolute best-sounding PC speakers in their price class.


Price range: $89.00 - $99.00

More info about BOSE Companion 2 speakers or here...

More Ear Candy (0.3)

Ear Candy is, as mentioned earlier, a sound level manager, written by Jason Taylor, that nicely fades applications in and out based on there profile and window focus. Let's say you are listing to music and suddenly a Skype call comes. Ear Candy will lower the music automatically for you until the Skype call is ended. A real win for user-experience. Of course the same is possible for movie-players, Firefox or whatever you want. It's about time we started feeling the benefits of PulseAudio.

Here's a demo:

I would personally really love to see this integrated into the GNOME "Sound
Preferences", where Fedora is doing a lot of work on at the moment. In an Email I asked Jason Taylor if he had thought about integrating the project upstream and here's his reply:

...Much of this is going to move down to the pulseaudio level shortly, part of this work will allow assigning profiles through environment variables and desktop files, hopefully in the future no UI will be required at all. That being said pulseaduio and many apps are not going to work out of the box for a while to come.
I really wrote this app because I use Skype for work constantly and I like being able to mute music when the phone rings :)

Thanks to open-source (and Jason Taylor) we all can benefit from this now!

Installing Ear Candy:
Currently there's no .DEB package, but you can download the Alpha version from Launchpad with a few commands in the terminal. You will need to have bzr installed. In the terminal write:

bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.3/ -r20

Just go in the 0.3 directory and type:

./ear_candy

Then a icon in the system tray should appear and you're good to go.

For more information, visit the project page on LaunchPad
Thanks to Stefano Forenza for helping me out and to Jason Taylor for improving the Linux user-experience.

Linux Ear Candy

That's right, ear- and not eye-candy this time. A new project called "Ear Candy" has seen the daylight. Ear Candy is a sound level manager that nicely fades applications in and out based on there profile and window focus.

What works now :
- All volume adjustments are fades
- Fade out music/video players on Skype call
- Fade to music player with focus when more than one
- Fade out music player when video playing
- Fade to left or right based on window position (How useful is this.... well its fun to play with)
- Pref UI for creating rules

Goals to aim for:
- Mute all clients on suspend / hibernate
- More default rules covering common apps, totem, mplayer, ekiga, skype, firefox etc


For more information, visit the project page on LaunchPad