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[Linux only] EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager that automatically changes your sound depending on the current application using it. For instance if you listen to music and a Skype call comes in, the music will fade out (based on your settings) until it's turned off, and the skype sound will be the only one running. Or if you listen to music and then play a YouTube video, the music will be again turned off and you will only hear the sound of the YouTube video.

The application doesn't have a fancy interface, it only does what it's supposed to, and does it well.

Here is a video with an older version of EarCandy and Skype in action:



(Watch it in full screen)


Some cool EarCandy 0.4 features:

-If you plug in an USB handset, the audio will be automatically transferred to it.
-A tray applet that looks like the Gnome volume applet lets you adjus the behaviour.
-You cna easly adjust the sound fade speed.
-You can lock the volume: in case you don't want EarCandy to change the volume anymore, you can lock it.
-Smart volume detection: fixes some problems with YouTube. Before, if for instance you played and then stopped a YouTube video, the sound in your music player would have been turned off with no option to turn it on. This was fixed in version 0.4.
-In this version, EarCandy tries to figure out which application is a video player, a music player and so on, so it can automatically add them so you don't have to do it manually.

web upd8

To install it, open a terminal and:
bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.4 earcandycd earcandy./ear_candy

PS: if you had an older version of Earcandy install, remove remove it before running 0.4

Update: Ubuntu users can download a Earcandy .deb file from here.

Then play some music in your favourite music player and then play a YouTube video.




Update: Earcandy 0.5 is out