Use a custom sound for the "remote ringing" feature

[DodoLeDev]

Hi everyone, first and foremost, thank you so much Andy Holmes for this program!
I am now using it for several months, and I love it… when it succeeds in connecting to my phone! (I often encounter the problem that my phone can't be found on the network, but that's not the topic for now)

After deeply tweaking my sound themes on my computer, I found that Valent plays the phone-incoming-call.oga, from the freedesktop sound theme, when I ring my computer remotely.
But after changing this reference, by creating a custom sound theme with a different phone-incoming-call.oga file,
I discovered that Valent doesn't use it, but uses its own file instead, as we can see here

g_object_set (ringer->playbin,
                    "uri", "resource:///plugins/findmyphone/ring.oga",
                    NULL);

What I would suggest, is to use the system-wide sound reference called phone-incoming-call of the current sound theme, and if none is found (which I highly doubt), use the Valent one.

What do you think?

[andyholmes]

I'm not sure what I want to do about this, to be honest. The reality of sound themes is that they are awful and I don't think anyone wants to fix the situation.

I avoided it entirely because the obvious thing to use is libcanberra with GSound, and I've been down that road and it required maintaining one or two fallbacks. For that to work at all in a Flatpak, Valent would have to be given permissions for the host filesystem, which is not going to happen :)

So the answer is I'm not really sure what I want to do about it, but sound themes are probably not the solution I'd choose. Maybe just a box to select a sound file, but that's not very awesome either.

[andyholmes]

Ah, this looks like what we will want: flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#929

[DodoLeDev]

Maybe just a box to select a sound file

Yeah that's a good solution! 😃

[andyholmes]

Ah, this looks like what we will want: flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#929

I think this will be the proper solution. A plain sound file is really not friendly for accessibility users.