GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 599621
empathy volume control doesn't show up in the "Applications" tab of "Sound preferences" when using pulseaudio
Last modified: 2010-09-24 05:32:21 UTC
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic daily build, fully updated. Empathy version: 2.28.1. The problem is that the volume control for Empathy doesn't show up in the "Applications" tab of the "Sound preferences" dialog of pulseaudio, which makes it impossible to reduce the volume of the sound notifications generated by empathy. I currently worked around by disabling sound notifications entirely. Ubuntu bugreport: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/460334 The following bug might be related: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598509 (using wrong pulseaudio media role under every circunstance)
I guess that's because the application appears in pulseaudio's app list only when it's actually playing sound. Empathy is there when you are in an audio/video call, right?
Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't try it with audio/video calls (is there a test number I could call, like for Skype?). I didn't work with the pulseaudio library, but I assume that the presence of an application depends on it keeping open some kind of handle / pipe / channel. For example I can see both Firefox and VirtualBox in my "Sound Preferences" dialog, even though at the moment neither of them are playing back anything...
You can try to call echo@test.collabora.co.uk using Jabber.
Calling echo@test.collabora.co.uk didn't make it show up for me. Being unable to change the volume level is actually pretty severe (IMHO). On a scratch install of Ubuntu 9.10 the volume level for Empathy notifications is set so low that I can barely hear them with my speakers cranked up. Pidgin on the other hand works flawlessly out of the box. Maybe they haven't switched to PulseAudio or maybe something else went wrong with my install. In any event it's not obvious why the volume is set so low for Empathy notifications nor is there an option to fix it. I'm not sure whose fault it is and I don't really know how to debug it further. If there's a way to make the pulseaudio volume control show up in Empathy that would be a big help for new users.
This bug does not exist in Lucid with empathy 2.29.93 (well I never faced it before either). When I am on call with any contact I can simply see the entry for empathy in the sound preferences
Agreed. Closing the bug for now. Thanks!
Just a clarification: after playing around a little more with it I found that the notifications (ie. new message, contact offline/online) are actually based on the system "Alert" feature. So controlling its volume is the same as controlling the "Alert volume" from the "Sound effects" tab. I agree that this is not a bug, but it is somewhat complicated to figure out.