xfce4-mixer
This package contains a volume control application based on GStreamer written to conceptually fit into the Xfce desktop environment. It also includes a plugin for the Xfce panel. Along with OSS and ALSA, it also upports PulseAudio and Sndio.
The Xfce panel plugin presents itself with a nice speaker icon. Clicking onto the icon, the volume can be changed:
| xfce4-mixer Speaker Icon |
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There's also the well-known context menu, providing muting functionality, running the mixer application or opening the properties dialog:
| xfce4-mixer Context Menu |
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For the plugin and volume settings to work, you have to have the correct sound card and channel selected in the plugin's properties dialog:
| xfce4-mixer Sound Card and Channel Dialog |
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In addition, it provides a simple-to-use mixer application. Of course, everything is fully translated into many different languages:
| xfce4-mixer Application |
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The mixer works smoothly not only with the well-known ALSA setup, but also with PulseAudio:
| xfce4-mixer using PulseAudio |
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Keyboard Shortcuts
The panel plugin optionally supports global keyboard shortcuts for raising and lowering the volume, as well as muting the selected track if compiled against libkeybinder. The plugin will then handle the XF86AudioRaiseVolume, XF86AudioLowerVolume, and XF86AudioMute keyboard symbols.
Xfconf Configuration
The mixer application supports the following properties in the xfce4-mixer channel:
/window-widthwidth of the main window (integer)/window-heightheight of the main window width (integer)/sound-cardselected sound card (string)/sound-cards/*visible controls of a particular sound card (array of strings)
The panel plugin supports the following properties:
sound-cardselected sound card (string)trackselected track (string)commandcommand which can be run from the plugin menu (string)enable-keyboard-shortcutsenables or disables keyboard shortcuts (boolean)
Debugging
Both the mixer application and the panel plugin have a builtin debugging mode
which will print additional diagnostic output useful for bug reports. For
xfce4-mixer it can be activated by specifying the --debug command line option,
diagnostic messages will be printed to stderr. For the panel plugin, please
follow the instructions at http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/debugging and
set the PANEL_DEBUG environment variable to xfce4-mixer-plugin,gdb, the
diagnostic output will be printed to stderr and backtraces will appear in the
log file corresponding to the plugin.
Known Problems with GStreamer
- No sound card detected: if this happens, you're probably missing a GStreamer plugin for your sound system. If you get this message on a Debian or Ubuntu system and you're using ALSA then installing gstreamer0.10-alsa should fix it. On OpenBSD installing gst-plugins-good might help.
Latest Release
- xfce4-mixer 4.18.1 released (2023/05/01 20:21)
- Download current release (older versions of this component are also available here)
Source Code Repository
Reporting Bugs
- Reporting Bugs – List of currently open bugs and instructions on how to submit new bug reports