Some time ago in the #rapache channel Jason, which is the author of many of the nice features found in Rapache, came up with the idea of leveraging PulseAudio and do something with it.

Well.. that was not a bad idea. I mean, until today PulseAudio brought lots of brokeness to Ubuntu (not to say Fedora) users but .. can you say to have enjoyed any benefit from it ? Even one, I mean. After a few days he came up with a little project he called EarCandy.

Ear Candy to the rescue. This simple utility sits in your traybar, watches on the windows on your desktop and manages the sounds for you. Let’s say for example you’re listening some music. Then suddenly a skype call comes. Ear Candy will lower the music automatically for you until the skype call is ended. Same (with fries) for movies and whatever else you want.

Ear candy features a nice configuration panel which lets you configure settings for each application. Since the preset apps are very few, you may want to add new ones. In order to do that, open that app, make it produce some sound, then click the “+” button and select it from the list you see.

As an added bonus, you can make it dinamically alter the application’s left/right volume balance, based on the screen position of its window.

You can download the alpha from launchpad with this command:

bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.2/
bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.3/

Update: the 0.3 version now appear usable, and requires *much less* configuration of the applications. (it autodetects quite everything)

Keep in mind it’s just a 0.2 0.3 release ! (and yes, the launchpad project is named eyecandy, not earcandy. yes, that’s misleading)

Finally here’s with a demo video [ source ]:

Congrats, Jason ! Hopefully this kind of functionality will be integrated by default in the Gnome desktop someday !