Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[Bastien Nocera]

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 20:10 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 22:26 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 13:22 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 13:50 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure the interweb provides half-a-gazillion mixer type
> > applets, but the mixer applet as it were was removed from gnome-applets
> > upstream.
> 
> Which is stupid. Deprecate first, then remove only after the new code
> has gone through at least one cycle of wide release.

Thanks, love you too.

And ship two apps with that do the same thing in the desktop? What a
great way to confuse things further.

> > > Seems like yet another case of ripping out a stable solution and
> > > replacing it with a new, shiny and immature one that fails to provide
> > > similar functionality.
> > 
> > You had about a year to complain that the Volume Control feature didn't
> > include your use case, and given the 0.01% of the population using their
> > sound system like you do, I doubt it would have crossed our minds that
> > this could have been the case.
<snip>
> Which brings me to now. Fedora 11 isn't even released yet. So don't give
> me any bullshit about not being proactive about testing. Pulseaudio
> isn't the only broken crap in Fedora.

I meant the volume control feature on the Fedora wiki. It's been there
for a year. Sure you can ignore it. But then you're going to complain
when it breaks things for you.

> > >  Can I at least get a secret gconf key to do what
> > > I want? :P
> > 
> > The volume control uses PulseAudio, it doesn't use ALSA directly
> > anymore, so no, there's no secret GConf key for that.
> 
> So a PulseAudio config option then. Do I have to write the patch myself?

Probably not a PA config option either.

The volume control applet will show a mixer for input devices if an
application is recording on it. You'd just need to make the mixer think
that something is recording on that device. I'm not sure how to do that,
but Lennart might.

> And why do Pidgin alert sounds explode my speakers now? Yeah pump the
> hardware volume up to 100%, that's great... Why does Pidgin still not
> have native Pulseaudio support? I set it to use paplay because in the
> past Pidgin would leak PA connections and RAM like crazy and choke the
> machine dead any other way. This "flat volume" thing now seems to mean
> short alert tones will cause obnoxious volume glitching if they happen
> to be louder than my music.

I don't know what Pidgin uses, but spitting out alert sounds using
paplay is unlikely to work well at all. You need to set the
"PULSE_PROP_media.role=event" envvar before launching paplay. Otherwise
it thinks paplay is a normal, say, music application and will change the
volumes.

That's a good use of your patch action: port Pidgin to use libcanberra.