The Great Pulseaudio Mixer Debate: a modest (productive) proposal

[Hans de Goede]

On 04/24/2009 08:03 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> So, in the spirit of light rather than heat, here's my proposal, again,
> rescued from the depths of the flamefest, with some actual work
> attached.
>
> g-v-c is clearly intending to be an abstracted and simplified volume
> control app / applet to cover the most common use cases in a friendly
> way. Great.
>
> It's clear, though, that some users have needs beyond this, which are
> likely only going to be satisfied in a sensible way by access direct to
> the ALSA mixer elements. Bastien and Lennart don't want some kind of
> hack to expose these via g-v-c, and I'd tend to agree, that's clearly
> not what it's designed for.
>
> So my proposal is that we include by default an alternative GUI app
> which allows direct access to the mixer channels. This won't be an
> applet or anything else persistent, just an application that you can
> choose to run if you need that level of access. Basically the same as
> Lennart's "just use alsamixer" suggestion, only a GUI app that will be
> more discoverable and easier for most people to use (it's a bit tricky
> to figure out 'alsamixer -c0 -Vcapture', for instance).
>
> At first I suggested including the XFCE mixer for this purpose, but now
> that feels a bit awkward. It's really part of XFCE, its menu entry is
> just named 'Mixer' and renaming it to something appropriate for GNOME
> might not be appropriate for XFCE. And it has a slightly odd interface
> rather than the 'immediate screenful o' sliders' that people are used to
> from the old g-v-c.
>
> So I suggest what we should do is resurrect gnome-alsamixer. It's still
> technically part of GNOME - it's even got moved to the new GNOME git.
> Other distributions still package it (Debian, for e.g.) It's even had a
> few commits within the last year or so. It was more or less deprecated
> in favour of g-v-c, but now we have a case where it may make sense to
> have two clearly differentiated apps, and gnome-alsamixer is the obvious
> choice.
>
> I just pulled the latest code out of git and threw together a package
> (based on the spec from Mandriva, since I had it lying around). It
> builds and works fine - you get the kind of interface most people will
> be expected, a tabbed window with each of your available output devices
> on a tab, and the typical 'bunch o' sliders' layout for each device. In
> the package I've added a menu entry with the name "Advanced Volume
> Control" and the comment "Full hardware access volume control
> application".
>
> The package is available here:
> http://adamwill.fedorapeople.org/gnome-alsamixer/ (the SRPM, spec file,
> and an x86-64 build for current Rawhide). Please take a look at it if
> you're interested.
>
> Just to reinforce this, gnome-alsamixer shouldn't interfere with Pulse
> or g-v-c at all; it doesn't run persistently, it doesn't mess anything
> up in gconf or anywhere else that would affect those. All it does is let
> you poke the raw mixer elements, just like alsamixer only graphically.
>
> I know the GNOME folks are generally opposed to having two apps that do
> 'the same thing', but it's very clear from the long threads on this list
> and elsewhere that g-v-c really doesn't do the things that many people
> need it to do as of yet. If we ship with just g-v-c as a graphical
> 'mixer' available by default we will wind up telling many many people to
> drop to a console and use alsamixer - and annoying a lot more people who
> don't ask, find the release notes, or figure out how to use alsamixer on
> their own. I really don't see how providing an alternative graphical
> mixer app is worse than that.


This gets a big +1 from me!

Regards,

Hans