No audio notifications from Transmission.

[RogerH]

I'm using Debian 9.1 with the MATE DE. When downloads complete with Transmission, I get a notification message but I don't get a notification sound, even though the option to do so is checked. Any ideas?

[maximus1978]

I'm using Debian 9.1 with the MATE DE. When downloads complete with Transmission, I get a notification message but I don't get a notification sound, even though the option to do so is checked. Any ideas?

Try launching pavucontrol. Does it show any activity at the time when the download completes?

Are you launching Transmission in a terminal? Any messages showing within the terminal?

Can you post?

Code: Select all

aptitude show transmission

[RogerH]

I'm using Debian 9.1 with the MATE DE. When downloads complete with Transmission, I get a notification message but I don't get a notification sound, even though the option to do so is checked. Any ideas?

Try launching pavucontrol. Does it show any activity at the time when the download completes?

Are you launching Transmission in a terminal? Any messages showing within the terminal?

Can you post?

Code: Select all

aptitude show transmission

Thanks for the assistance. I did a little more tinkering and found that in Sound Preferences, the Alert Volume bar was not displaying. After a little bit of googling, I found a thread on the Linux Mint forums that if libcanberra-pulse is missing, it will not display properly. I checked, and sure enough, the library was not installed, so I installed that. Now the Alert Volume slider displays, and I can change it, but every time I reopen the Sound Preferences dialog, it is set back to zero.

I also installed pavucontrol, and I saw that only transmission-gtk and transmission-common were installed, so I installed the main transmission package. When I run the aptitude command you gave me I get:

Code: Select all

ibm@debian:~$ aptitude show transmission
Package: transmission                    
Version: 2.92-2
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Priority: optional
Section: net
Maintainer: Sandro Tosi <morph@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Uncompressed Size: 9,216 
Depends: transmission-common (>= 2.92-2), transmission-gtk (>= 2.92-2) |
         transmission-qt (>= 2.92-2) | transmission-cli (>= 2.92-2)
Description: lightweight BitTorrent client
 Transmission is a set of lightweight BitTorrent clients (in GUI, CLI and daemon
 form). All its incarnations feature a very simple, intuitive interface on top
 on an efficient, cross-platform back-end. 
 
 This is just a metapackage depending on one of the front-end alternatives
Homepage: http://www.transmissionbt.com/
Tags: protocol::bittorrent, role::dummy, use::downloading

So, with all of these packages installed, I started a torrent and ran pavucontrol, and when the download completed I did not hear the bell and pavucontrol did not show a volume bar for Transmission. For the heck of it, I opened the Sound Preferences dialog box again, turned the Alert Volume all the way up and kept it open. Same thing, no bell when a download completed.

This isn't a dealbreaker for me, otherwise the system is fantastic. If this can't be fixed I can live with it.

[debiman]

do i understand correctly, that you do have sound otherwise?
the problem is with transmission?
i think there is a workaround:
you can write a little script that plays a sound - test if it works from the command line - and tell transmission to execute that script after torrent completion.

[ i use transmission-daemon, not the gtk interface, and it has a ~/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json config file, with these settings: "script-torrent-done-enabled": true, "script-torrent-done-filename": "/home/<username>/.config/transmission-daemon/script-torrent-done" etc. - i would think the gtk interface works similarly. ]

[RogerH]

do i understand correctly, that you do have sound otherwise?
the problem is with transmission?

That is correct. Sound works for every application except for when Transmission is supposed to play a notification sound. I will try your workaround with the script.

[RogerH]

Just letting you know one more detail about the PC I was experiencing this issue on: it had been updated from Jessie to Stretch. However, I also did a fresh install of Stretch+MATE on another machine and I am experiencing the same problem, even after installing libcanberra-pulse and adjusting the alert volume. Not sure what else I can try, but like I said I can live with this issue.

[debiman]

what about the workaround?