[pulseaudio-discuss] Per-application volume glitching, and an idea for multiple channel volume control

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 09.01.09 13:59, Jud Craft (craftjml at gmail.com) wrote:

Heya!

You'd do me a great favour if you'd properly quote in your emails like
everyone else does. I have a hard time following what you are
responding to.
 
> A good point, but you can't expect all Linux applications to alter
> their sound playback to be forward compatible with Pulse.  I'm sure
> Skype will get right on that. :)

The number of subsystems for event sounds are limited. It might be
difficult to make everyone tag their streams, but for event sounds
this should be feasable.

> There is still the case where programs that _do_ play long sound
> streams will still not be accessible when they don't play sounds.
> (Ex, a Banshee/Amarok that's stopped).

If a media player is paused it will still appear in pavucontrol.

If a media player terminated its stream it will not show up. But I
would say it is a bit a constructed use case: why would you want to
adjust the volume of something you don't hear? I mean, music volume
you probably want to adjust while it plays because music playback is a
long time process.

> I suppose it comes down to what you see Pulseaudio as an abstraction
> around:  streams of sound, or the sources of sound themselves.  I
> always like to think of it as the sources(applications) themselves,
> since that is immediately recognizable.  A user sees Banshee on the
> screen and knows that Banshee plays sound; he's not concerned with
> whether it's playing a sound at that very second or not.  Even if the
> app is quiet, the app is still there; it's unintuitive that Pulseaudio
> has suddenly forgotten about it just because it's not playing.

PA actually hasn't forgotten. We store the volume/device of a stream
in our stream database. This database is actually readable from
clients. (In fact pavucontrol reads/modifies it for the event sound
slider). It is solely an UI issue to implement what you ask for --
although I still doubt that it makes much sense for anything that is
not an event sounds.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4