Music pausing/unpausing on phone not working correctly

[Casper]

I use Skype and Rhythmbox on Fedora 13.

Whenever Skype makes any noise (be it a contact login notification or an actual incoming call) the music gets paused, and unpaused again when the sound finishes. This is normal behaviour, what happens most of the time, and is expected.

However, sometimes (for no reason I can determine) music does not pause.

Also sometimes the music does not get unpaused when the Skype sound finishes.

Furthermore, sometimes Rhythmbox is paused before the sound starts, but gets unpaused when the Skype sound finishes.

This does not happen every time, but with my 3-4 active Skype contacts it happens several times a day.

I have now commented out module-cork-music-on-phone in /etc/pulse/default.pa , which is an effective workaround and disables pause/unpause functionality alltogether.

Package versions:

skype-2.1.0.81-fc10.i586

pulseaudio-0.9.21-6.fc13.x86_64

gstreamer-0.10.29-2.fc13.x86_64

gstreamer-0.10.29-2.fc13.i686

rhythmbox-0.12.8-4.fc13.x86_64

[coling]

I recommend you comment out the line that loads "module-x11-cork-request" in /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11

I do this by default in Mandriva and I believe this is disabled on Ubuntu too.

The problem is that the x11 approach to corking applications (by faking key strokes) is simply unreliable and doesn't work in all cases.

That said, I'm surprised you're getting the problem with Skype's notification sounds as I was under the impression that these were correctly tagged as "event" sounds rather than "phone" sounds in any recent Skype version... but perhaps not :S

[Ford_Prefect]

This is two bugs (both of which I see here):

1. Skype doesn't tag event sounds as such (at least on 3 independent setups)

2. module-cork-music-on-phone doesn't track the cause for the pause (rhyme!)

This is quite annoying so I'm marking this as to-be-fixed for 1.0.

[coling]

Part 2 should be solved by dda564f which I committed today to git master.

With part 1 I can now confirm that some of the event sounds in skype are correctly tagged but some are not. The noise made during messaging seem to be correctly tagged but the sign in/out alerts for example are incorrectly tagged. I'll leave this ticket open until I've spoken with my Skype contact.

[coling]

I've spoken to a contact at Skype to alert them to the tagging issue. They are aware of the problem and reckon it's a result of the way the routing works. A simple workaround might work, but it may also be a little more complex.

Either way, they are now aware of the problem and there is little else we can do at our end, so I'll close this bug.