Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[Stephen Warren]

On Tue, April 21, 2009 6:50 am, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 23:29 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
>> So, the shiny new pulseaudio mixer setup in F11 took away my ability to
>> tell the panel applet which channel to use. It seems to insist on
>> messing with the master. I have a second computer hooked in to the line
>> in, so it can share speakers with my main box. I had it set up so the
>> master volume was set on maximum, and the panel volume thingy adjusted
>> the PCM volume. This allowed me to adjust volumes separately, the
>> secondary box stayed at a constant volume and the main box could be
>> adjusted freely without affecting the secondary machine.
>>
>> How do I get this behavior back?
>
> _This_ behaviour, no. Any reasons why you don't use PulseAudio over the
> network instead?
>
> I'm afraid that your use of the volume control wasn't really something
> we thought about, and I'm not sure that's a use case we're that
> interested in catering for.

I think I also rely on this use-case (i.e. telling the mixer which
channel(s) to control).

I forget the exact names, but my laptop has separate volume controls for
the built-in bass and non-bass speakers. In older Fedora releases, this
"just worked". In F9 (I think), the mixer (and volume buttons on the front
of the laptop) started to control only the non-bass speaker volume, so
that the bass volume was always maxed out, which wasn't usable. I had to
configure the mixer to control both the bass and non-bass mixer channels
together (and I think I had to hack the alsa configuration to actually
create the bass mixer channel at all, or something like that)

So, is this all handled in a better (i.e. automatic) fashion now, or is
the lack of channel selection going to be another regression for me?