[pulseaudio-discuss] RFC: Change the device-restore database to allow per-port volumes

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Arun Raghavan at 25/08/11 17:08 did gyre and gimble:
> On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 22:58 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> This is a patch set that will likely mostly interest David, but also
>> solves one of the remaining niggles I have for 1.0 - the fact that
>> volumes are not set properly on port changes.
>>
>> Now this only "solves" that niggle when the module-device-restore is used,
>> but I'm happy enough to rely on that for now seeing as it's the default
>> on 99.999% of desktop installs.
>>
>> The overall benefit of this patch is that it allows different volumes
>> to be saved and restored for different ports. Combine this with David's
>> work on making jack-detection work (which triggers port changes) and you
>> automatically get different volumes on headphones vs. speakers.
> 
> My main concern is the following scenario:
> 
> 0. Say we start with built-in speaker and headphone port and equal
> (maybe 70%) volume
> 1. With headphones plugged in, I've got the volume turned up while
> playing something that's naturally not very loud
> 2. I pull out headphones, start playing something that's quite loud, I
> turn down the volume
> 3. I put the headphones back, find the output too loud (since the port
> volume was turned up for the previous stream)
> 
> While the current scenario isn't ideal, it's easy for users to wrap
> their head around (different devices have different loudness levels). If
> we don't handle this sort of case in the per-port-volume case, IMO the
> behaviour is potentially confusing/frustrating to users.
> 
> Maybe there's a simple way to handle this that I'm missing ...

I'm not sure there is a way to handle this really. Either we want
volumes per-port or we don't. IMO we do (this is how it works on my
iPhone for example) and I think from the various mumblings I've heard
over the years most people want this type of functionality.

But perhaps there is indeed some magic solution that we are both missing :p

Col




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

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