Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 22:50 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Firstly the alsa mixer init database should have set up your system
> correctly. The database is incomplete unfortunately since most people
> don't send in a patch for the db after they fixed those settings
> manually.

Your database will _always_ be incomplete. There will _always_ be new
hardware, and users will _always_ have to tweak things manually.

You can do well, and it's a wonderful thing to be doing -- but you
_have_ to accept that you can't get it right in all cases, so you have
to let the user fix it.

> However my plans for F12 should hopefully help to make this issue go
> away: on many machines we have quite a few volume controls in
> series. e.g. on Thinkpads there is the hw volume that is controlled by
> those magic keys, and then there is master, and then there is PCM. My
> plan is to collapse them all into a single slider which is possible if
> we have dB information about the sliders. The resulting slider would
> be the multiplication of the seperate sliders. This would both
> increase the range and the granularity of the overall volume slider
> and also allows us to fix the mixer initialization issue a bit since
> we would control both PCM and Master. 

That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. I've often had to play
around with levels for PCM vs. Master vs. other things to maximise the
resulting volume¹ without introducing distortion -- you're effectively
downgrading my audio capabilities unless you _always_ get it absolutely
right. On which topic, see above.

And then factor in the observation that we're talking about analogue
circuitry and physical devices which will even vary a little from one
machine to the next machine off the production line. Not to mention what
my ears can detect. Your database _cannot_ know.

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

¹ And that's even without the bit where I plug in external speakers and
  want to use those in _addition_ to the internal ones, which PA also
  breaks.