Sometimes applications don’t always (or can’t) describe a window correctly, which can make Compiz use a different animation. For example, when I drag a tab out of Google Chrome it uses my open animation for the window, which really disrupts the feel of drag and drop tabs that otherwise is very elegant. Another example is with generic frameworks like Adobe AIR or Java Swing, where all the widgets are treated the same. How do we work around this?

Luckily, Compiz is well equipped to handle this. You’ll need the Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (CCSM), which I think almost everyone has installed, and it should exist out-of-the-box so users can see how powerful the software really is. In the case of Google Chrome:

1. Open CCSM (ALT+F2 ccsm or Preferences/Compiz Configuration Settings Manager)
2. Click the Animations plugin
3. Press the New button underneath the list
4. Select None for the animation with the lowest possible duration
5. Click the Add icon near the Window Match field
6. Click the Grab button and target Chrome (it should give you class=Chromium-browser)

Make sure this is moved up the list so it overrides any other settings, since it’s specific to Chrome. You can later go back and click the Grab button again and add more windows to the blacklist. Now when you drag tabs in Chrome they won’t be so awkward. After getting used to no opening animation with one application, I ended up disabling them for all. I still use the other animations, but I’ve enjoyed not having any opening animations for non-decoration windows.

Firstly, here is the hardware we are working with:

$ sudo lshw -C sound
  *-multimedia
       description: Audio device
       product: 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 1b
       bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
       version: 02
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel

The PCI identifier of this specific model is 8086:284b. You can get this by lspci -n | grep "00:1b", but you’ll have to replace “00:1b” with your information from the previous lshw command. Thankfully getting this to work is rather simple, but involves fiddling with the track mixer and some switches. Needless to say it can take a while to figure out the right combination, but it involves 3 steps for my hardware.

First make sure you’re looking at all the information your sound device has to offer. Open the volume manager by right clicking the icon and selecting “Open Volume Control”, then click the “Preferences” button near the bottom and make sure you have all the items selected:

Now make sure that the proper input method has been selected by choosing the “Options” tab in the Volume Control window. Mine had to be set to “Analog Inputs”, but the default Input Source of “Mic” worked for me with my internal microphone:

Lastly go to the “Recording” tab and make sure the slider for your capture device is all the way up:

With my hardware the “Mux” amplifies the microphone volume. Putting it all the way down makes the sound input very weak, but putting it all the way up makes it heavily distorted. I have found a decent balance for my recording environment and sound device, so make sure to test the actual sound with Applications » Sound & Video » Sound Recorder.

If you’re using Skype it might help you to know you may have to manually select your sound device from the menu. For me this was the first option on the list for both my Input and Output device in the Sound Device options. I blame all of this on PulseAudio, which so far has been nothing but headache, undelivered results, and a waste of time.