Ear Candy is a smart PulseAudio manager. It’s fades in and out your music according to other sounds events (videos, skype calls, etc), and manages automatically your USB headsets.
Find out more about EarCandy at this post.
David D. Lowe (Flimm) has been kind enough to package Ear Candy.
To try out EarCandy using his PPA, open a terminal and type the following:
gksudo /etc/apt/sources.list
then add the following lines at the bottom:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/flimm/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/flimm/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Then type:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install earcandy
You’ll then find EarCandy under the Gnome menus.
Also check my post about how to free yourself from APT key errors once for all.
Stand alone .deb
Shall you desire to try out EarCandy using a .deb before to take the burden of adding the PPA’s you can use this one:
https://launchpad.net/~flimm/+archive/ppa/+files/earcandy_0.4-0ubuntu1_all.deb
Keep in mind that you’re encouraged to use the PPA though, as many bugfixes may come from there.
Meh, why not make a new PPA for it? I don’t feel like getting updates to the rest of the programs there. It’s not hard either; few clicks on the website and a copy/paste in .dput.cf.
I thought the same, but it’s great to have it even in a shared PPA.
I’m not into PPA’s, if anyone is willing to take the burden (or maybe I could ask jason to open a earcandy-dev launchpad group)
Don’t even a new group either, one person can have multiple PPA’s. But of course an official one is good, yes.
I’ll write a mail asking KillerKiwi to open a dev team on launchpad.
I’ll ask him to add Flimm and (perhaps?) you. Would that be ok ?
Nah I’ll opt out. Busy with other things…
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?search=0×2DF02DE166EDC9AF0940BF03AC9D76CD6E73CA45&op=index for the key (to not get those not trusted messages)
That was quick! The blogosphere is awesome!
Just a note though: my PPA is not the official Earcandy repository, so the last sentence of the blog post is not technically true. I’m waiting for KillerKiwi to start an official repository and to see how he reacts to my changes to the source. I just uploaded the package to my PPA to make sure it builds properly on the launchpad servers.
PPA for Hardy please. It is LTS after all!!
Ethnopunk: I have a bad news for you. While the previous versions of earcandy used to work on Intrepid and I guess Hardy this new version doesn’t. That’s because the volume sniffing feature is not supported by the PulseAudio version shipped in those Ubuntu versions.
It also has to be said that volume sniffing is a pretty important feature, as many applications just don’t behave right, so that’s a workaround for many things.
Jaunty is pretty stable and pretty nice, think about a (full back up and) upgrade.