[pulseaudio-discuss] Why Gnome "System Sounds" is not a normal program?

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

'Twas brillig, and Roman Beslik at 02/01/12 22:53 did gyre and gimble:
> As far as I understand, PulseAudio uses an interesting strategy of
> routing sound to several sound cards. Instead of selecting a sound card
> in each client, a sound card is selected in a general program, e.g.
> "pavucontrol."

Yeah, pavucontrol is a bit of a rubbish example, as we really don't do
much with it to make it a "nice" program. It's basically a very
functional client that can access 99% of PA features. Generally speaking
however we'd expect most users to use the tools provided by their
preferred desktop environment rather than pavucontrol directly (e.g.
gnome-volume-control, kmix, phonon settings etc).

While applications can, in theory, provide their own GUIs to select
sound devices, good HCI guidelines would dictate that they should not do
this. Users should learn the one, single, central way to adjust sound
related settings and not have to learn each and every individual sound
producing application's menu hierarchy/configuration system to uncover
the sound preference.

> There is an exception. The program "System Sounds" is always present in
> "pavucontrol" but without a sound card list. Instead, I chose a sound
> card for system sounds in "gnome-sound-applet." This is inconvenient and
> even strange.

Yeah, the sound card list is missing as event sounds are generally
routed to the default card.

There are some changes in the pipeline that I want to make that will
perhaps expose this somewhat differently and allow a specific device to
be picked for event sounds, tho' - as always - it's really up to the
desktop environment designers as to how much functionality they want to
expose.

Col


-- 

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

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