I'm not sure where to put this, feel free to move it. I've noticed that if I'm playing audio from a Qt app (Clementine using pulseaudio) and a gtk app makes a noise (usually a notification sound) it causes a slight hickup in the qt app's playback stream. I'm assuming this has something to do with two different streaming components conflicting with each other; possibly something I have configured wrong. Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks.

EDIT: May have fixed it. Used gconf-editor to manually change the gstreamer sink to pulsesink and source to pulsesrc

Can you check to see if the Gtk application is using Pulseaudio or something else?
The necessary GStreamer plugin for Pulseaudio might be missing.

bcooksley wrote:Can you check to see if the Gtk application is using Pulseaudio or something else?
The necessary GStreamer plugin for Pulseaudio might be missing.

I don't know how to check what Chrome is using, but another app that does it (Pidgin) I have set to use ALSA. It happens when I have it set to "Automatic" as well, and pluseaudio isn't an option.

I would suggest checking in your package manager to see if the Pulseaudio GStreamer package is installed in that case.

bcooksley wrote:I would suggest checking in your package manager to see if the Pulseaudio GStreamer package is installed in that case.

gstreamer-0.10-pulseaudio is installed, however there is a gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio that isn't installed.

Something else I've noticed is that something pops up in my notification area very briefly (far too short for me to ever hope to see what it is) when a GTK app makes a sound. I feel like this probably has something to do with it. Looks like the GTK apps are launching their own sound server which causes a break in the KDE stream.

EDIT: What it looks like is happening is that KMix is disappearing from the notifications panel briefly while the gtk app sends sound.

That is highly unusual for KMix to disappear.

Can you check to see if other gstreamer1.0 packages are installed? If they are, then it may be worth installing the gstreamer1.0 pulseaudio plugin as well.

bcooksley wrote:That is highly unusual for KMix to disappear.

Can you check to see if other gstreamer1.0 packages are installed? If they are, then it may be worth installing the gstreamer1.0 pulseaudio plugin as well.

I don't have any other gstreamer1.0 packages installed.

Hmm... are you able to convince a Gtk application to continuously playback a sound to see if it is using Pulseaudio?
It could be that Pulseaudio is lowering the volume (albeit temporarily) to give the notification priority, which is causing the "popping" effect.

bcooksley wrote:Hmm... are you able to convince a Gtk application to continuously playback a sound to see if it is using Pulseaudio?
It could be that Pulseaudio is lowering the volume (albeit temporarily) to give the notification priority, which is causing the "popping" effect.

I use Chrome as my browser, so I can play a youtube video or something, how do I check whether it's using pulseaudio?

You will see an entry relating to Flash Player (or Chrome itself) in pavucontrol in this instance, depending on how your system uses Youtube.

bcooksley wrote:You will see an entry relating to Flash Player (or Chrome itself) in pavucontrol in this instance, depending on how your system uses Youtube.

Chrome shows up as an ALSA plugin, and Pidgin shows up as "playback stream on." It seems as though playback is smooth after changing the audiosink for gtk apps, but kmixer still disappears briefly.

Could you check to see if KMix is simply being hidden rather than actually fully disappearing as a system tray icon?
You can do this by changing the setting for KMix to "Always Visible" in System Tray Settings > Entries. Once this is done, it should stay around.

bcooksley wrote:Could you check to see if KMix is simply being hidden rather than actually fully disappearing as a system tray icon?
You can do this by changing the setting for KMix to "Always Visible" in System Tray Settings > Entries. Once this is done, it should stay around.

It still disappears after setting it to be always visible.

Can you check to see if it still running under the same process ID? It could be crashing and automatically relaunching.
You can find the process ID out in System Activity, which is accessible from KRunner.

Just as a last question - is it correct that your audio issues with regards to playback are now fixed?