On Sun, May 17, 2026, at 7:52 AM, Philippe Mavridis via tde-devels wrote:
Great job!
TMix seems to work great here and I like the user interface much better than both of KMix and pavucontrol.
Thank you. this was very hard to get right to make it intutive and easy to use .
There's both a full mixer, and a mini-mixer.
It also for example pops an additional "recording" systray icon, an idea I stole from my wife's Mac. When recording it gives you a global icon so you know. in tmix - you can see if anything is recording globally and click on it to adjust inputs.
I also wanted to live up the spirit of TDE wherever I decided to make a design decision to offer both options. For example, you can the mixer in a tabbed mode (similar to pavucontrol) or in a non-tabbed mode where all interfaces are available at once (like a real mixer). You can show a the new recording bar feature or not. you can even just not use the minimixer and go into the full mixer by default.
I also wanted to go beyond what pavucontrol offered in terms of the device menu. We show not only profile input selection, but if there are options (Ex: use speakers OR headset for output on my intel card), and we show the plugged/unplugged status of each port on the audiocard. This was actually immediately helpful to me as my motherboard doesnt label the 6 different 3.5mm jacks and I always forget which is Line-Out.
I don't know about replacing KMix just yet, but I think that we do need a good PulseAudio mixer in tdemultimedia such as this one.
There's 2 options. one is keep kmix. Alsamixer still exists and works for example.
The latter is to write alsa into tmix, and then my concern is primarily for our friends who are using TDE on FreeBSD as I know very little about what people typically use on those systems.
It may behoove people to sometimes still use tmix with an alsa output because alsa has some additional settings occasionally that I think pulse may not bubble up around card settings. However, we could also show those probably in the pulse one, so yeah.
Some things are still missing (LICENSE/COPYING file, tray tooltip showing volume %, translations, etc.) but these are quite easy to solve.
Yes. I'm 'more of an ideas guy'...
It might be a good idea to go through the code a bit more carefully -just to be sure- since it seems that some of it was co-authored by a LLM model (and a lot of users have negative or conflicting feelings about "AI"), but you must have put in a reasonable amount of work to polish it to this extent and I think code LLMs *can* be a reasonable tool for aiding development, so I see no real issue here.
I profoundly agree with you here. I'm not shooting a slop PR into the master tdemultimedia. I wrote this using Claude. I directed the input but did not direct the output. I have been going over some of the code now to get acquainted and look at issues with it. Additionally I am concerned about my career prospects as AI continues to take away hard parts of my job.
On the other hand - I waited 15 years and now I have a pulse mixer for TDE in the matter of a few nights of work, something that would have probably taken me months and may never have gotten done.
In a way, lower labor costs for programming is a boon for niche environs, especially one where there is so much documentation as code from hundreds of other programs, libraries and models. Claude is able to effectively work as I once did, read other examples, and implement them.
On a different note, I have accumulated some minor patches in order to improve compatibility with the master branch of TDE and I'd also like to add support for using icons from the user-selected icon theme as I previously did with KMix: https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tdemultimedia/pulls/31
So Kmix and tmix both have a big set of hardcoded icons. icons i find to be retro, beautiful and charming (though ironically i dont like the primary tray icon). However I believe this is in violation of the larger theming standards that TDE apps should meet. Perhaps we can offer the default theme with the builtin icons, OR allow for the system icons.
Overall, I hope we could see this in R14.1.7.
If we can get people to test spin this on many cards, configurations and devices and would give detailed feedback about the UI/UX usability, I would be more comfortable with that idea. Right now I am 'comfortable' having this also be an independent project - another boon of AI, that anyone and everyone could have their own mixers they like in a day or two.
And not to throw the elephant in the room, I have a set of patches out there to kill ArtsD entirely, which maybe tmixer could come alongside and be released concurrently.
Regarding future proofing - pulse/pipewire is forward compatible at this point in time where pavucontrol works with pipewire, and ours will probably do so as well, but it may behoove use to build better and cooler interfaces for pipewire!
-- Philippe M.
Saturday 16 May 2026 02:30:05 Calvin Morrison via tde-devels написал(а):
hi guys,
please see this repo and give feedback if you cane
it is a pulseaudio based mixer for TDE. it's similar to kmix but not identical. It's similar to pavucontrol-qt but not identical.
If you can build it, let me know, if you cannot build it, let me know
if you like it... let me know! maybe it could go upstream at some point into tdemultimedia, it would take work, translations, a help guide, probably minimally also an ALSA backend as well.
https://git.ceux.org/tmix.git/
thank you all
tde-devels mailing list -- devels@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to devels-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/devels@trinitydeskt...