[pulseaudio-discuss] Mic input volume controls

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 03:09:10PM +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:

> wouldn't hurt anyway... that said, WTF is the diffrence between a front
> and rear mic physically on a laptop? Do they *really* make laptops with
> two mics on them for this purpose? (from the names I'd have to expect a
> yes answer there, but seeing as my laptop has no built in mic, I'd say
> having two is just showing off :D) But more seriously, why are there
> front and rear mics? Is this for >stereo recording? If so should these
> inputs be handled as a single, multichannel source rather than separate
> mono or stereo ones? I mean we don't expose the "Rear" playback so why
> do we do it on mics? As you can tell, my foo for recording is rather weak :D

You might have more than two microphones built in to use them for beam
forming applications in which case you're looking at a many channel
array and do want everything in sync.  On the other hand you may be
doing something a lot less sophisticated and just have several sets of
microphones for different physical use cases (eg, one set for use in
tablet mode with the screen fully folded over and another for use in
laptop mode) in which case you'd probably have only one in play at
once.  Or even some combination of the above :)