[pulseaudio-discuss] flat volumes for privileged apps

[Arun Raghavan]

On Tue, 2015-10-20 at 10:12 +0200, Xabier Rodríguez Calvar wrote:
> 	Hi,
> 
> O Mar, 20-10-2015 ás 09:55 +0200, Wim Taymans escribiu:
> > The point of flat volumes was that if you're using the application
> > > volume slider, you don't need to hunt for two volume sliders to
> > > adjust
> > > to get the full range of volume that your hardware allows. To my
> > > mind,
> > > your proposal makes sense as an alternative to what I suggested
> > > only if
> > > we move to a model where we suggests applications do _not_ have
> > > volume
> > > sliders at all, and then design the desktop UX differently to
> > > provide a
> > > single-action way to adjust volumes.
> > > As an example, the shell could track what the current playing
> > > stream is
> > > based on the foreground application and volume controls (hardware
> > > and
> > > panel mixer) could track that volume and apply changes as flat
> > > volumes.
> > > So the user is always only dealing with one control, by default.
> > > (I
> > > just thought of this, so probably needs to be fleshed out to make
> > > sense, or maybe it doesn't at all.)
> > This is an interesting idea. Because the slider is part of the
> > shell,
> > we can trust it to be user-controlled and thus give is access to
> > the
> > flat-volumes of
> > the stream. It's like the slider from the current app in the mixer
> > appears in the shell task bar.
> > 
> > In any case, this would work nicely with this proposal and since
> > you
> > would remove the volume from the apps, making all app-controlled
> > volumes relative would be a good default.
> 
> We won't be able to remove the volume bar from WebKit. Besides, at
> least in browsers, you can have several media in the same page so you
> do need the volume bars at the applicacion, at least in certain
> cases.

Certainly, and for those cases, we'd need to have a reasonable idea of
what to do (possibly apply a relative volume increase on all streams).

> I really like the concept of flat volumes, it eases user interaction
> a
> lot though we know it presents some other issues like malicious apps
> (WebKit is per spec one of them).

Agreed -- my other proposal is meant to allow us to keep flat volume
behaviour by default while having a way out for potentially problematic
apps.

-- Arun