Well it's taken me a little time to commit this work, but here it is. This is the fruits of my labour from the KDE Multimedia Sprint earlier this year.

As well as taking part in various discussions, I was able to spend some time cooking up a UI to control the configuration of PulseAudio and the various cards attached.When adding PulseAudio support to the various parts of KDE that need it (Phonon, KMix), there was an important part of the puzzle missing: a card profile selector, and a sink/source port selector. I had always intended to include this functionality somewhere, but the KMix framework didn't really allow for it neatly (I could have created a separate dialog of course but it didn't quite feel right).

The eagle eyed readers may have seen a sneak preview of this feature when looking at the KDE-specific help page I wrote up on the PulseAudio website. So I give you this: the Speaker Setup tab in System Settings.

The little icon in the middle is your user icon, so you'll see this differently unless your a weird stalker type and have set your icon to mine :s

The various drop downs allow fully control over all cards that are attached to the system. The buttons on the main pane allow you to test each speaker separately. In order to test the speakers, libcanberra is used. libcanberra is an implementation of the Free Desktop Sound Theme specification. It allows this test to be implemented with minimum hassle and I'm not personally interested in reinventing the wheel, hence the use of this library and the additional dependency. Some people dislike using libcanberra in KDE (as was apparent from some discussions at the Multimedia Sprint), but I believe the reasons were often personal ones and not related to the usefulness of the code. If someone really wants to factor this out, they can but I have no interest in doing so and will prefer to use the existing implementation whenever possible (and this would include any future implementation I may or may not do with regards to support the Sound Theme Specification in KDE (or maybe Qt) directly)

When a 5.1 surround system is presented, the GUI is obviously a bit more advanced:

For those naysayers, I've tried my best to ensure that the compile will work fine without PulseAudio installed. It should also degrade gracefully when it is compiled with PA support, but PA is not configured to be used at runtime. The whole tab will simply not be available.

There is still one small problem left in that I don't handle disconnection/reconnection yet. This causes the GUI to crash if the PA server is stopped and restarted. This is not typically something that happens, but it's still something I will fix shortly all the same.

This code is now in trunk (r1154776) so feel free to try it out and report other bugs etc. This GUI is also included in Mandriva Cooker (I did want to include it prior to 2010.1 release, but the timing didn't work out - tho' it probably would have been OK considering the delays that cropped up in the release process). I expect this functionality to be included in any updated/backported versions of KDE for 2010.1.

For reference, in case you didn't spot it yourself, this GUI was heavily inspired by the gnome-speaker-setup utility.