I sometimes play games and also open my music player, but the sound from the game drowns out the music, so I need to go into the sound mixer on KDE and manually lower the game’s volume every time.
I was wondering, is there a way to do this process automatically? As in setting up conditions like “if music is playing (some MPRIS API?) then lower all other apps’ volumes)”, maybe even crazier “if some app is outputting voice then set its volume back up and lower music app’s volume or pause its playback altogether for some specified timeout that keeps being refreshed for as long as voice is heard”.
I imagine the latter is a bit of a dream, but maybe for the first, even some quick sound profile selector would go a long way, say switching from “normal profile” to “background music profile”, etc. which specify preconfigured volumes for those apps.
Is that a thing?

  • unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    7·
    2 months ago

    The details depend a bit on the audiostack of your distro, but they all have a cli program with which you can change inputs/outputs and volume; e.g. pactl for pulseaudio and wpctl for wireplumber.

    You’ll need a mechanism to find your triggers (I create a firefox tab with youtube/spotify, I have a music player active) and then you can act on it.

    Detecting voice in an audiostream is probably technically possible, but that sounds pretty hard to setup.

    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      21·
      2 months ago

      So what I’m getting is that I would have to come up with something myself, right? I mean that would be super cool to do, but I don’t have the time to put into that, unfortunately

      • unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yes, a quick web search later I haven’t found a readymade solution.

        Setting the volume for specific outputs is not very hard, so maybe a middleground solution is to have two shortcuts. One for “game mode” and one for “music mode” or whatever.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
    51·
    2 months ago

    Pulseaudio should have hooks

    # cat /etc/pulse/default.pa
load-module module-switch-on-connect
load-module module-exec
load-module module-exec arguments="path/to/your/script.sh %s"

    (where %s resolves on trigger to the name of the sink added)

    Your script.sh should then match the first argument to the name of the sink you want to control, and then run

    # path/to/your/script.sh
if [ "$1" = "THESINKIWANT" ]; then
  pactl set-sink-volume $1 40%
fi
    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      42·
      2 months ago

      55 minutes? Uhm, could you tell me the relevant section of the video, please?

        • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolOPEnglish
          62·
          2 months ago

          Why so irritable? I’m just asking, I don’t even know German, I thought since you knew the video already, you could point me in the right direction, rather than me having to sift through it all while also passing it through a translator to hopefully (because I don’t know how well youtube’s auto-translate feature works) find the information I’m looking for in the whole presentation

          • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
            1·
            2 months ago

            So you dont know german, this changes some things.

            The person explains

            • Alsa
            • pulseaudio
            • jack
            • pipewire
            • audio hardware
            • jack plugins
            • common types of audio modulation (compression, limiting, amplifying, equalizing,…)
            • how pipewire combines all of those
    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      41·
      2 months ago

      This is the architecture though, I’m asking about an application that can interact with it

  • korny@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    It won’t do any of the automation stuff, but PCPanel was a savior for my volume woes: https://www.getpcpanel.com/

    Makes it easy to swap output to other speakers, and you can set specific programs to each knob, button and slider.

    It would be simple to bind your music player to a specific knob, then another knob for any active window to control any games. Also there’s play/pause function as well which is really helpful while listening to music.

    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      On a quick skim I don’t see a way on it to set volume profiles, let alone program behavior based on certain events, is there some menu I might have missed?