Use the existing audio stack to play event sounds

[Pat McGowan]

This merge introduced several new packages in order to produce sounds on calendar events
https://code.launchpad.net/~charlesk/indicator-datetime/alarms/+merge/204420

We should rather use existing APIs in QtMultimedia or go directly to the media service in the platform api.
- reduce number of packages supported
- allow coordination for audio playback from multiple sources
- support multiple encoding formats

[Ted Gould (ted)]

libcanberra just wraps around GStreamer and Pulse which are parts of our current audio stack. It's just small convenience API that we already support in main. Adding full Qt support to indicator-datetime seems kinda crazy (it doesn't have any Qt deps today)

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Defintiely agree not to add a new large dependency. Please check the media-hub then for suitability.
I did not see any dependency into gstreamer so was concerned, also added libvorbis decoder.

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

It's better to use the in-house media-hub API anyway, even if we're just swapping one wrapper for another.

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

After talking to jhodapp about media-hub, he suggested that ricmm's upcoming media API in platform-API would be the better match for this kind of task.

Pat, what do you think about tabling this until the platform-API changes land?

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

That sounds fine, thanks for following up

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Charles Kerr <email address hidden>wrote:

> After talking to jhodapp about media-hub, he suggested that ricmm's
> upcoming media API in platform-API would be the better match for this
> kind of task.
>
> Pat, what do you think about tabling this until the platform-API changes
> land?
>
> ** Changed in: indicator-datetime (Ubuntu)
> Status: In Progress => Triaged
>
> --
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> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1283065
>
> Title:
> Use the existing audio stack to play event sounds
>
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[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

Not a total fix in the sense of using the Media API, but a step in the right direction:

https://code.launchpad.net/~charlesk/indicator-datetime/lp-1337348-use-gstreamer-api, written for bug #1337348, uses GStreamer directly and so drops the libcanberra packaging requirement.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-datetime - 13.10.0+14.10.20140714.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
indicator-datetime (13.10.0+14.10.20140714.1-0ubuntu1) utopic; urgency=low

  [ Charles Kerr ]
  * Use GStreamer's API directly to play sound instead of using
    libcanberra. (LP: #1283065)
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Mon, 14 Jul 2014 13:40:44 +0000