Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Thu Apr 23 19:18:54 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 17:31 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Still I think that playing audio through line-in a pretty exotic
> feature. If you want to do weird stuff like this, go to the ALSA
> mixer. It's not that PA takes that away from you. You can always
> bypass PA if you really feel that you need 555 different controls.

Yes, monitoring what you're recording on the line in is SUCH an unusual
need! Just think of what I'm doing as monitoring a recording without
actually recording.

If you want Pulseaudio to ever be more than a toy for Aunt Tillie,
you're going to have to pull your head out of your ass.

> > 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.
> 
> You can, just bypass PA.
> 
> If you want to do weird stuff, use weird tools. Don't expect us to
> support all the exotic use cases minds could come up with to support
> in a single simple UI.
> 
> > 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?
> 
> The point of line-in is that you can record from it.
> 
> Doing line-in/mic feedback to line-out is something I deliberetaly don't
> plan to support in PA.

It's called "input monitoring" and it's not unusual. Why is someone with
no apparent musical or audio recording background in charge of core
Fedora audio infrastructure?

> A sound card is not an amp.

I don't want it to amplify, in fact that's exactly what I don't want. I
just want it to pass line-in through to the amplified speakers as
untouched as possible. I want 0dB. How many different ways do I have to
explain this before you get it?

> > 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.
> 
> That was no response. That's what Stephen suggested himself (I
> assume are referring to 496981).
> 
> A laptop with integrated bass speakers is certainly not the type of
> machine I have on my list as the most common piece of
> hardware. Actaully I still cannot believe that such a thing exists.

So apparently it is Fedora policy to only support common hardware.

> What complicates the matter is that we cannot properly deduce if some
> weird system has bass speakers connected to "Master mono" or not. It
> could be something completely different. tbh I have not the slightest
> clue how this should be exposed.

You expose it in the UI as a volume and a "tone" slider. Or "bass" and
"treble" sliders. Christ, have you ever looked at real physical stereo?
The 'exposure' is the easy part. Yes, the low level details are probably
going to be a bitch. But handling those kinds of details are your *JOB*.

> > 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.
> 
> I mean, you guys complain over over-simplification. Now you are
> over-simplifying this entire story. Just because PA hides many exotic
> 'features' it doesn't mean you cannot access them. You can always
> bypass PA and get the complex ALSA mixer. Try 'alsamixer -c0'

All I want is for the taskbar mixer applet to adjust PCM instead of
Master. THAT'S ALL I !@#$ING NEED, LENNART! I don't even want it to be
exposed in ui. A secret daemon.conf option would be JUST FINE.

> This whole thread is so pointless. The same people just keep repeating
> the same issues over and over.

Because you and Bastien Nocera are being defensive, stubborn
thick-headed dicks who aren't listening. Yes, we get it. Disagreeing
with the almighty Lennart Poettering is a pointless waste of time. Don't
bother even trying!

> Let me summarize this:
> 
> The main reason why this issue actually has become a problem recently
> is that modern cards don't do the jack switching in hw anymore but leave
> that for the software and provide jack sesning. Jack sensing is now
> supported for two chips or so in ALSA but there is no code that would
> actually make use of the jack sensing interfaces. PA should of course
> make use of it. Unfortunately none of the sound cards I posess
> currently is supported by ALSA jack sensing, so I cannot really work
> on js right now.

I've had this motherboard for 3 years. I don't give a shit what "modern"
cards do or don't do. All I want is for what worked before to continue
working.

> 3) People want to do exotic things like (mis-)using their sound cards
> as analog mixer for multiple analog sources. Or for driving internal
> and external speakers from the same sound card at the same time. I
> think this doesn't make much sense and won't support it in PA. If you
> want to use it, drop to the raw alsa mixer.

> 5) People want PA to use a different mixer control than 'Master'. I
> don't think this is a good thing to do. There is a workaround for this
> as mentioned, but this is one of the most basic things a driver should
> get right. Hence, fix it in the driver. I am not planning to support
> this beyond allowing you to edit some config files to set this up.

I don't care what you think. This isn't about what you think. This is
about what the end user wants. Namely ME. Clearly, from this thread and
plenty of others in the past, you don't give two shits about what your
end users want.
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