[pulseaudio-discuss] Jack detection

[David Henningsson]

On 2011-05-19 20:53, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 13:44 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
>> Agree with the port property. About the port vs profile question, I
>> think we might think that backwards from a user's perspective.
>> Conceptually I'd say we select port first (manually or automatic;
>> doesn't matter for this reasoning), then we evaluate what profiles make
>> sense to try. If we're on headphones, only stereo profile makes sense,
>> if we're on line-out, we might want to consider surround profiles. At
>> least I would want it to work that way in the UI.
>>
>> Could you elaborate on having profiles without ports? IIRC Pulseaudio
>> would fail in this case.
>
> No, Pulseaudio doesn't fail in the scenario that I'm talking about - the
> "no ports" situation is an optimization for the case when there would be
> only one port to select from. If the profile (or more precisely the
> mapping associated with that profile) has only one path in the mixer
> configuration, then the sink or source will not export any ports at all.
> The reasoning for that is probably that having a single port on a sink
> would be redundant, because currently the only functionality ports offer
> is that the user can change between them.
>
> However, if the "available" property is added to ports, then exposing
> even just one port on a sink will not be redundant.

Then keeping that port makes more sense IMHO, compared to adding an 
"available" property to profiles.

> I'm not sure what you are proposing with regards to selecting ports. Did
> I understand correctly that the user should be presented with all ports
> of all sinks and sources of a card in one big list?

Something in that direction. E g in gnome-volume-control, you would 
still have an output and an input tab (but the hardware tab could be 
removed). On the output tab you would have:

1) a list of all ports with available != no (assuming we don't optimise 
ports away)
2) a list of profiles available for that port (stereo, 5.1, etc)
3) balance controls for that profile
4) a "test speakers" button (moved from hardware tab)
5) a checkbox "select this port automatically when it becomes available"

Does that make sense?

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic