Improved media-key handling with xfce4-volumed-pulse 0.2.2

Background

So xfce4-volumed has been around a while and automagically handling your media keys – originally written by Steve around 2009 – but lingering unmaintained in Xfce’s Git repository. This version of the media-key daemon uses gstreamer 0.10’s mixer interface, which has been deprecated in gstreamer 1.0.

It’s been almost as long that Lionel forked the project into xfce4-volumed-pulse in 2012 – hosted on Launchpad ever since – notably adding support for PulseAudio.

Migration to xfce.org

Not much has happened since then, until Sean and me decided to move the project over to the official Xfce infrastructure for more distributions to enjoy. This means the code is now on git.xfce.org and bugs are tracked on bugs.xfce.org.

I also went ahead and added some small features to it (all documented in the Readme). Amongst others I merged a feature branch adding support for the Microphone Mute key (thanks goes to Christian Pointner for the feature). I also added support for symbolic icons, which means your audio volume change notifications can now be shown – presuming you have at least xfce4-notifyd 0.3.2 installed – with always correctly colored monochrome icons. This latter feature has been made optional through an “icon-style” xfconf property in the newly created xfce4-volumed-pulse channel. This same channel now also handles the “volume-step-size” property, which used to live in the xfce4-mixer channel (this really didn’t make sense to me anymore with xfce4-mixer not supporting PulseAudio). Finally we cleaned up the repository a bit and Sean was kind enough to knock out the 0.2.2 release while I was afk.

Anyway, without further ado here’s the code:

https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-volumed-pulse

PS: It might be worth noting that if you’re using the xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin you already have your volume keys handled by it.