So my Pidgin has been without sound for some time now. I figured it was about time I figured out why. It turns out that Ubuntu 8.04 and its use of Pulse Audio is the culprit. If there was one thing about Ubuntu 8.04 that they really blew, it was the sound.
I'm sorry but there are just too many apps that don't handle Pulse Audio well or at all. Even some amazing sound utilities and apps. Hello? Audacity?
So how do I get around this issue? Well I noticed that under the Preferences | Sound tab I can change the method to "Command". So as a lark I put in aplay and the path to a wave file. Sure enough it worked just fine. The next problem was how do I get the individual sounds to play rather than the same sound for everything?
Simple! A Google search later and I find that you can just slap a %s in there instead. So the command I use is "aplay %s". Now I finally have Pidgin sounds again.
Ubuntu! Hey! Get going on how to get all this sound stuff working without having to tweak all of this stuff! Sure I understand that not everything is going to work with Pulse yet, but if there is a work around, then you should have it in your packages to use it. Perhaps it was a bit early to move to Pulse. Perhaps moving early will speed other apps to adapt faster. Either way its annoying while everything is caught in this transition.
