Generic audio handler for Mozilla Applications

This patch is largely irrelevant for the Mozilla code base from 2.0, since they can interface to the sound system on linux directly. You can however use my notification sound if you like.

This patch to the Mozilla 1.x source code adds a generic handler to play back audio for applications like firefox or thunderbird. I made this patch, because I'd like to have a notification when new email arrives, but mozilla uses the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (ESD) for this purpose which doesn't work smoothly with my alsa setup. After applying this patch you can use any audio player on your system to handle playback.

The handler is configured via the environment variable MOZILLA_AUDIO_HANDLER which contains a shell command to start an audio player which gets the audio stream from stdin. To play .wav or .voc files through alsa devices add the following line to /etc/profile (or some other appropriate place) and restart your shell before starting thunderbird:
export MOZILLA_AUDIO_HANDLER="aplay - &>/dev/null"
If your favourite notification is in mp3 format use mpg123:
export MOZILLA_AUDIO_HANDLER="aoss mpg123 - &>/dev/null" (if you don't have alsa, remove aoss)

Download

If you want to build your own mozilla application, apply gtk2-alsa.patch. I built my thunderbird with help from my thunderbird.sh script.

My current notification sound: gs.wav from Chris Hülsbeck's Great Giana Sisters.

Contact

For questions and suggestions contact: Dirk Jagdmann <doj@cubic.org>

patch request for official mozilla sources

This patch was sent to mozilla developers as #346011 however I closed that item.