Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 11:50 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 04/23/2009 07:09 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Will Woods  wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 19:18 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> >>
> >>> What do you mean? Having full control of your soundcard with all the
> >>> sliders and stuff is useless?
> >>> Not displaying everything 1-1 and hiding sliders is an improvement?
> >> Holy hell yes:
> >> http://people.redhat.com/alexl/files/why-alsa-sucks.png
> >>
> > 
> > Wow that's great. I wish my soundcard (Audigy4) had that many
> > controls. It's only about half of it.
> 
> Thank $deity. Very few people really want to fiddle with that many
> controls. That UI is clearly not a sane one.

Probably true -- and there's a very good case for simplifying it by
_default_.

But just breaking certain features, including "play audio through line
in", or "set the speaker volumes as the user wants them" is really not
the way to do it.

I can't play DVDs through my TV from my laptop at the moment either --
the only way I could get sufficient volume before was to plug in some
external speakers (which automatically turns off the internal speakers)
and then use gnome-volume-control to turn the internal speakers back
_on_ again. I can't do that any more.

The proposals I've seen to work around PulseAudio's problems have been
ridiculous -- running audio over the network using PulseAudio,
introducing a bunch of latency which wouldn't otherwise be there, was a
stupid suggestion even if the other box wasn't running Windows. The
hardware has a line-in socket for a reason -- are we just going to
advise Fedora users to tape over it and pretend it isn't there?

And the response to Stephen's need to control bass and treble speakers
individually was stupid too -- you _don't_ want to just tie them
together. Depending on what he's playing, he might need to adjust the
relative volume of bass vs. treble. That's not an unreasonable desire.

While I completely accept that we should be showing something _simple_
to the user in the default case, we really _do_ need to do better for
the cases where the user needs something more than that.

It's not good enough to just say "No. I know your hardware can do that
really well and it used to work, but we have decreed that your use case
isn't important so you're not allowed to do it that way any more".

That just sucks.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation