New Kmix is Coming, New Kmix is Coming

After nearly twelve years of using KDE with basically the same ole Kmix, Trever Fischer, Fedora Ambassador and KDE hacker, has today announced that his herculean quest of rewriting Kmix has yielded some results. It's still considered pre-alpha, but Fischer has posted the code and a screenshot!

The new mixing interface is inspired by PulseAudio mixer, but Fischer is redesigning the way it actually operates as well. In fact, he says it's working on his desktop fairly well. His design sounds like a major improvement and Kmix is way overdue.

One of Fischer's ideas is stop all the collisions that commonly happen behind the GUI. All the different sound component tend to do their own thing despite other mixing controls doing theirs. So, Fischer says he's using one autoloaded daemon to control the different backends. This should help minimize conflicts and allow for the elimination of some old code.

Another key feature of Fischer's design is the ability to control your sound levels outside the GUI with scripts or with a different interface.  In his GUI, we'll get a "set of controls (such as your internal audio output, or the output of chrome’s flash plugin), a set of control groups (Output Devices, Recording Streams, etc), and a single interface to adjusting the master volume (which is whatever the user configures)."