Fedora Rant #3 - why are the sound controls so weird?

akonstam at trinity.edu akonstam at trinity.edu
Sat Aug 13 20:55:30 UTC 2005


On Sat, Aug 13, 2005 at 04:34:22PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> I'm running Fedora-4 on a Sony C1VFK Picturebook,
> with a Yamaha YMF-754 audio controller (according to lspci),
> and I'm having trouble with sound -
> which sometimes works perfectly, but more often does not work at all.
> 
> Now the problem may well be with the hardware,
> but my gripe is with the various methods which seem to be offered
> for controlling sound.
> 
> I should say that I am running KDE,
> and I'm not entirely sure which tools belong to KDE, which to Fedora,
> and which to Linux generally.
> 
> System Settings=>Soundcard Detection
> strikes me as completely useless.
> What exactly is the point of it?
> Has anyone ever found it of any use?
> 
> Why isn't there a System Settings=>Sound
> which will allow me to change the sound settings?
> 
> The Control Centre=>Sound & Multimedia=>Sound System
> is almost as useless.
> containing only settings which I cannot imagine any normal person using
> (eg control sound from another computer).
> 
> I have a Sound icon (a loudspeaker) in my panel,
> and if I right click on this and choose Show Mixer Window
> a KMix window comes up with a large selection of controls,
> all of which are more or less meaningless to me.
> 
> What does a right-angle triangle, half-shaded in green,
> with a letter b on the hypotenuse, mean?
> Does this symbol have some universal significance?
> 
> What does "FM Legacy" mean?
> What does it mean to set this control to say 55% ?
> And what is the strange icon, looking a little like a pen,
> which appears above it, and 4 other different controls?
> 
> What a mess!
I share you frustration. I would stat with alsamixer and set the
channels at the right levels. Which for me means maximum except for
microphone if you don't have a microphone.

You don't mention the options under Applications ->Sound and Video
The volume control might help. But I don't know if they show up in
the kde menu.
-- 

=======================================================================
The goys have proven the following theorem...
		-- Physicist John von Neumann, at the start of a classroom
		   lecture.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484




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