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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and David Kågedal at 15/01/10 09:55 did gyre and gimble:
> Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> writes:
> 
>>> By the way, with the per-output stream restoring it might make sense to
>>> also include the sink name in the onscreen display that shows the stream
>>> name. So instead of just "Music", it would show "Music via M-Audio
>>> FastTrack Pro (Headphones)". That would again provide more hints about
>>> what really happens (but I guess it would really be too much
>>> information).
>>
>> I thought about this too. It might make sense to show the device
>> string in the streams line iff there is more than one device.  In that
>> case it is useful and otherwise the information is redundant.
> 
> There is a related case that I mentioned a long time ago. I had a
> Creative X-mod USB card (I sold it, so I can no longer test this). It
> has a big round volume knob that I thought would be nice to use to
> control the volume of the sound coming from the device.
> 
> But no, the volume knob doesn't do that. I simply acts as a keyboard and
> sends increase-volume/decrease-volume keystrokes. This means that it
> would usually (depending on how I configure things) not control what
> comes out of the Xmod, but instead control the main volume (which are
> the internal laptop speakers or headphones.
> 
> The workaround was of course to make the Xmod the "main" device, and use
> the internal card as a secondary. But I was really annoyed by this
> misdesign.
> 
> Could this be solved in PA somehow?

It needs to be solved in various layers (from udev through to xinput
IIRC) so that the buttons on usb devices that act as keyboards can
control the appropriate volume.

But it's been discussed and will be fixed eventually yes :)

Col

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

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