[pulseaudio-discuss] Flat volumes and restoring the app volume

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Tanu Kaskinen at 31/01/11 20:48 did gyre and gimble:
> Before doing that, however, I would like to hear why you need to show
> the future volume. So that the user can set the volume higher or lower
> before starting playback? Why is the system volume inadequate for doing
> that? What is the use case where the user wants to turn up or down the
> music player volume before hearing anything, and only the music player
> volume, not any other application?

I would also say that players such as Totem just grey out the volume
icon when nothing is playing which seems like a fairly simple solution
to the problem but I totally understand if you don't like that.

When Tanu suggested reading the device from m-s-r too, this is a
reasonable solution *as currently implemented*, but it is highly likely
that m-s-r will undergo some changes in the not too distant future to
deal with priority lists - e.g. rather than an application just saving
one device, it would actually save a whole bunch, in order of
preference. If the highest priority device is not available it will fall
back to the next one and so on until it finds and available device (the
reasons for devices not being available would include, disconnected
network or bluetooth devices, unplugged USB etc.)

Add to that, we'll probably save this priority list for "categories" of
applications primarily (although support for individual apps will still
be kept). So all in all the whole routing logic will become more complex
and not just a simple matter of reading the saved device from m-s-r.

So I would prefer if you could do either:
 1. Just grey out the volume until the stream is connected.
or
 2. Very quickly connect a corked stream, read the volume and then
disconnect the stream again.

(I think the latter would work, but I've not thought too hard about it).

Col

-- 

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

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