[pulseaudio-discuss] Sink for event sounds? WAS: paplay - sound roles?

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 31/12/09 18:55 did gyre and gimble:
>>  It has always specifically hidden the UI element for moving
>> the event streams but I will happily add it back in and write the
>> appropriate stream restore rule if you don't have some fundamental
>> objection to it?
> 
> Would be great to have this feature in pavucontrol!
> 
> BTW, if you touch this code anyway it might be an idea to create a new
> tab which lists more role-specific sliders/dropdowns than just
> "event". I.e. a music slider, a telephony sleider and so on.

Actually I'm a bit aprehensive about exposing other roles just yet...

My reasoning:

At present pavucontrol:
 1) Shows an Event slider for all sounds with the "event" role.
 2) Hides individual streams with the "event" role.

This means that there is only one way to adjust the volume of these
streams and that is via the stream restore db and the widget.

Now the stream restore key format currently has a priority scheme. If a
stream that has a role has a role-based rule, it will take precedence
over an application based stream (IIRC it's role, app id, app name,
media name in that order).


So if I were to expose the other roles, and someone set a volume for
e.g. music, then went along and started playing multiple files in e.g.
rhythmbox, found it too loud and adjusted the *application* stream for
rhythmbox it would be adjusted for that stream and saved to the db as an
application specific rule, but the next time rhythmbox played anything
(e.g. on track change), the volume would be restored from the *role*
based rule.

The question is, what should be done here?

Some potential options:

 1. a) Make app rules override role rules.
    b) Provide a way to delete an app rule in the GUI (so it can revert
to the role rule).

 2. a) Provide a way to delete a role rule in the GUI (so it can use the
application rule).


Both options kinda need a degree of user understanding as to the
implementation.

I think we need to define how we want this to work in more depth before
I add these extra widgets to the volume control GUIs.

(I did raise this confusion a long time ago, but didn't really persevere
with the discussion to get to a sensible outcome...)

Thoughts?

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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