I sometimes play games and also open my music player, but the sound from the game drowns out the music, so I need to go into the sound mixer on KDE and manually lower the game’s volume every time.
I was wondering, is there a way to do this process automatically? As in setting up conditions like “if music is playing (some MPRIS API?) then lower all other apps’ volumes)”, maybe even crazier “if some app is outputting voice then set its volume back up and lower music app’s volume or pause its playback altogether for some specified timeout that keeps being refreshed for as long as voice is heard”.
I imagine the latter is a bit of a dream, but maybe for the first, even some quick sound profile selector would go a long way, say switching from “normal profile” to “background music profile”, etc. which specify preconfigured volumes for those apps.
Is that a thing?
The details depend a bit on the audiostack of your distro, but they all have a cli program with which you can change inputs/outputs and volume; e.g.
pactlfor pulseaudio andwpctlfor wireplumber.You’ll need a mechanism to find your triggers (I create a firefox tab with youtube/spotify, I have a music player active) and then you can act on it.
Detecting voice in an audiostream is probably technically possible, but that sounds pretty hard to setup.
So what I’m getting is that I would have to come up with something myself, right? I mean that would be super cool to do, but I don’t have the time to put into that, unfortunately
Yes, a quick web search later I haven’t found a readymade solution.
Setting the volume for specific outputs is not very hard, so maybe a middleground solution is to have two shortcuts. One for “game mode” and one for “music mode” or whatever.