Feb 20, 2009

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.

2 comments:

  1. Wow! Windows certainly doesn't have anything like this!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually, they very much do!

    http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Inside-Windows-7-Larry-Osterman-on-new-audio-capabilities/

    ReplyDelete