[pulseaudio-discuss] RFC: New volume functionality for PulseAudio

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2014-02-13 at 10:35 +0800, Raymond Yau wrote:
> 2014-02-11 22:03 GMT+08:00 Tanu Kaskinen <tanu.kaskinen at linux.intel.com>:
> 
> > Hi all!
> >
> > I'm working (together with other people at Intel) on adding system volume
> > control functionality to Tizen (primarily the IVI profile, although there's
> > nothing inherently IVI specific here). Tizen uses web APIs for the UI, and
> > since there are no existing web API standards for this functionality, we
> > need to design the API from scratch. The current design can be seen at [1],
> > in case you're interested (it's good background material for this
> > discussion). What I'd like to discuss in this thread, however, is not the
> > web API as such, but the use cases behind that design and what those use
> > cases ultimately require from PulseAudio. (Feedback for the web API
> > proposal is welcome too, but I think that should be discussed in a separate
> > thread.)
> >
> > We want to support:
> >  * A single main output volume control. Think of things like the Gnome
> > volume applet: when you click the applet icon, you get a single volume
> > slider for controlling the "current output", whatever that means. The Gnome
> > volume applet implements the main volume by using the default sink volume,
> > but we'd like to make the main volume contextual, so that the main volume
> > can control different things at different times. Ideally the contextual
> > logic would be implemented in PulseAudio (by a policy module), not in the
> > volume applet. The volume applet should know when the main volume controls
> > e.g. the headphones volume or the phone call volume.
> >
> 
> will it have a mute switch which is independent of the volume similar to
> those volume controls of HDA codec ?
> 
> for mobile phone and tablet which only have volume up and volume down, the
> mute is at the minimum of the volume
> 
> but the mute switch exist for a remote control of TV or settop box or
> notebook , the volume is unaffected when mute and unmute

You're right, there should be a "main mute" control. I have a mute
button on my laptop, so I really should have seen this use case...

> There are some codecs which does not have a mute switch independent of the
> volume control and use TLV_DB_SCALE_MUTE

This is not really relevant, because PulseAudio can synthesize a
software mute control just fine if there's no hardware mute control.

-- 
Tanu