On Hën , 2004-05-24 at 12:28 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote: > On Sun, 23 May 2004, gabor wrote: > > > global-volume: that's adjusted in the gnome-volume-applet...this is > > usually mapped directly to the sound-card (via oss or alsa).it adjusts > > the volume-level for all the applications > > I know that, but this is a somewhat confusing concept. > Your hifi-set probably doesn't have separate volume controls for each > component. If you have a mixer panel, then all sliders are neatly aligned > and you don't have to go hunting for them. HiFi sets that mix multiple sources into a single audio output do. Go to a club or concert somewhere, and get a peak at the sound setup sometime. There's typically a giant mixer board for controlling all of the different inputs that could come in from the band. Even a simple setup with two turntables has something like this, where there is a fader to decrease the volume of one, and increase the volume of the other, at the same time, for fading into one song, and out from the other. > This brings me to the concept of the Sensible GNOME Volume Control: each > opened program that accesses the sound server makes itself known > (preferably via DBUS with fallback for non-GNOME programs). The SGVC then > shows sliders for each of those processes, instead of incomprehensible > sliders for 'PCM', 'FM' and stuff like that ( sound sources like > Microphone and Line-In stay of course). Ugh. We are effectively getting to a point where we don't really need a sound server, and this brings that piece of latency back into the setup. It would great to get to that point, though having MAS or something for remote display setups would still be good. > > now someone sends you an icq message, and you nearly become deaf, > > because it was so loud...this way you can adjust rhythmbox to be a lot > > louder than the other apps. > > The SGVC could implement a Dolby-like algorithm that suppresses sound > volume above a certain treshold from the current volume. But it's not above that threshold. It's just insanely loud because you increased the Master/PCM volume controls on the hardware mixer. Another case in point, the IBM Thinkpads have 2 master volume controls. There is one controlled by software, that you see in gnome-mixer, then there is the one controlled by the BIOS and hardware buttons. Though, in windows, they seem to both control the master volume output. Having to go to a single location to change the volume level for a particular application, just sounds silly, especially when we are trying to move to a more doument-oriented environment, and a lot of the applications may not have visible names. And if one has a lot of applications running, then they would end up with this huge, horizontally-scrolling window to deal with, because the application names are so long. Perhaps we can just write a better progress widget for the media applications, so that there is a more visible difference between playback and loading progress of a stream, and what the volume is at this particular moment for that particular stream. And perhaps some standard volume control widget and API, so we can just stick a widget somewhere in the prefs dialog, or have a pop-up for volume control, such as many media applications do. > WDYT? :-) TWIT. :) -- dobey
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