[pulseaudio-discuss] BEEEEEEP

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 24.01.10 13:12, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:

Heya,

> Someone asked recently about the Beep mixer in alsa. With a PA enabled
> setup, controlling the Beep volume (when this is exposed via alsa)
> becomes awkward.
> 
> What is the best way to handle this? Could we tie it/slave it from the
> master volume via the alsa mixer profile stuff perhaps?

The PC speaker is something that needs to go away. I have no plans
covering that in PA. I have no problem pissing those people off who
think this relict from 1981 still matters in 2010. Generate proper
event sounds, folks. Really. 29 years of horrible beep sounds should
be enough. libcanberra is trivial to use and integral part of every
distribution that could matter. Use it and forget about PC speakers.

That said I do have plans in covering non-PCM hardware-mixed streams
eventually as some kind of fake sink input that is transparently added
by the alsa backend. That sink input would not add in any PCM audio
but still be around for volume control and whatever else might
matter. That way in pavucontrol you'd have one slider for each app
stream and one for input feedback from "Line-In" or so. This might
also become handy for mobile phone folks, who have audio streams that
bypass PA in some and want this nicely covered in the volume
control. This way this all could appear transparently for the client
applications and integrate well with flat volumes. And later on, when
we get proper jack sensing we could even have have those fake streams
appear and disappear based on jack status.

Of course, which mixer controls would be exposed as fake streams would
be configurable via the mixer path stuff. By default we'd probably
list only "Line-In" there, but if people have a fetish for nightmarish
and hearing-loss-inducing beep sounds they could add further controls
such as the PC speaker there.

But for now, alsamixer -c0 is your only friend if you are this crazy.

Lennart

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