[pulseaudio-discuss] Stream volumes as the universal volume adjustment method

[Tanu Kaskinen]

to, 2010-01-14 kello 23:25 +0100, Lennart Poettering kirjoitti:
> To be a bit more constructive this is what I kinda have in mind
> regarding stream and device volumes:
> 
> 1 in the UI prominently expose the device volume, since I believe this
>   is what the user wants to control more often.
> 
> 2 In the UI less prominently expose the stream volumes. Should be
>   available for some cases, like compensating for normalization issues
>   and suchlike.

Normalization issues == song or video that is too quiet (or in some
cases too loud)? I'd like to use the hardware controls for fixing these
temporary issues too. The hardware controls control the device volume,
but I think in practice it works well that way also, so no need to touch
the stream volume. Stream volumes should really only be adjusted by the
user in cases where two streams are active simultaneously or when some
application *consistently* plays at too low/high level. In other words,
the user should never touch the stream volume for temporary changes...
uh... except when playing two streams simultaneously.

> 3 As mentioned determine the perceived loudness of content streams
>   (i.e. music and movies), and allow configuration of auxiliarly
>   stream loudness (i.e. event sounds) relative to it.

I don't remember exactly what you said earlier (and I'm too lazy to
search and re-read the message), except that you mentioned implementing
ReplayGain partially. That gave me the association to automatically
normalizing all audio (not compressing - many people would like that,
but it shouldn't really be enabled by default). Auto-normalization would
be awesome, if it worked well, but it's probably impossible to make it
work well. But now after thinking a bit, I realize that you mean
something different: just tracking, not changing, the real music/movie
volume level is actually useful in itself, exactly for the purpose of
playing event sounds at a good level even when the user has changed the
device volume due to bad normalizing of the song/video.

> 4 Put a bigger focus on automatically managed stream
>   volumes. i.e. volume-follows-focus (Arun!),
>   fade-music-on-voip-signal and suchlike. That means, manage the
>   volumes of the streams by looking on the other stream signals and on
>   implicit user input instead of depending on explicit user input, if
>   you understand what I mean.

Those features make sense. I see it as a problem that the user has to
tweak the stream volumes when multiple streams are playing, because the
adjusted volumes are used later, when there's only one stream playing,
and in that situation the volume is probably wrong. Anything that
reduces the need to manually fiddle with volume, and stream volume
especially, is good.

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen