Smooth volume change in KDE

Of late, I am annoyed by my ThinkPad laptop's volume controls increasing and decreasing volume in steps of 19 (so practically I get only 5 different volume levels).  Today I decided to write a shell script to control volume, rather using the volume buttons on the laptop.  Since I use KDE, making the script talk to KMix using DCOP would be easy and portable (as in, the script will work on any machine running KDE).

KMix's DCOP interface is documented in its manual.  Here is the shell script in its entirety.  It's also available as a downloadable file to save you some typing.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Adjusts speaker volume in KDE.  Does so by sending DCOP commands to KMix.

set -e

function get_volume {
    dcop kmix Mixer0 masterVolume
}

function set_volume {
    dcop kmix Mixer0 setMasterVolume "$1"
}

if [[ "$1" == "" ]]; then
    get_volume
    exit 0
fi

old_volume=$(get_volume)

operator="$1"
shift

case "$operator" in
+)
    set_volume $(expr $(get_volume) + 5)
    ;;
-)
    set_volume $(expr $(get_volume) - 3)
    ;;
*)
    echo >&2 Unrecognized operator "$operator".  Use + to increase and - to decrease volume.
    exit 1
esac

I have saved this file with the name speaker-volume.  When this script is run without any arguments, it prints the current volume level.  When passed "+" as the argument it increases the volume by a small amount, and decreases it when "-" is passed as the argument.

$ ./speaker-volume
58
$ ./speaker-volume +
$ ./speaker-volume
61
$ ./speaker-volume -
$ ./speaker-volume
57

(You may notice that the increase and decrease in the volume is not accurate; I don't know why it is so.  +5 and -3 work reasonably well on my T60p laptop running Kubuntu Hardy.  You may have to tweak these numbers to suit your computer/taste.)

Tip: To make it easy to adjust volume, you can define global shortcut keys as described in my post about adjusting screen brightness.

Heaven and Hell

After being in Hell[*] for about a week, I ran into Yama.  He asked me how everything was, and I said, "it isn't as bad as I had thought."

"I'm glad to know that," he smiled.

"I wonder how Heaven would be!  It must be awesome to live in there," I said.

Yama chuckled and said, "Will tell you a secret.  It's pretty much the same.  Only it has a different name."

I was surprised to no end by this answer.  I thought for a second and said "Hmm... but I guess people in Heaven would be a hundred times happier than those in Hell."

"That's what even the people in Heaven think.  You know what I think?  Heaven and Hell start at Earth, and they end near their entrances."


[*] I mean Hell in general not the Christian Hell.

I'm over you

That's what I believed
Until this night broke me again.
Each broken piece has one want:
Won't you say that at least once?