[ANNOUNCE] New Mixer Handling in PA 0.9.16/F12

[Doug Ledford]

On Jul 28, 2009, at 2:59 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Tue, 28.07.09 14:32, Ben Boeckel (MathStuf at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>> Please note that it is our intention not to wrap obsolete mixer
>>> controls such as "CD", "PC Speaker", "MIDI" and so on. If you
>> file a
>>> bug asking for those to be wrapped we will disappoint you and
>>> close the bug WONTFIX.
>>
>> Curious: would patches be accepted if someone else did it or is
>> there just no support at all?
>
> Let me stress that we explicitly decided not to expose those
> controls. This has nothing to do with whether there are patches for
> that or not. So yeah, if you file a bug with a patch this will most
> likely be treated the same as a bug without a patch and closed
> WONTFIX.


Will PA ever expose the Monitor capability of input ports?  If not,  
I'll have to keep using gst-mixer or something equivalent forever.   
Just for clarification, here's my audio configuration:


iPhone ->        7.1   -> line in
5.1 speakers <-  KVM   <- front, center, rear, sub out
Logitech USB headset  <-> headset mic in, headset out

The ports that are on the 7.1 KVM are shared with a Windows Vista  
computer.  The 5.1 speakers are used for everything except VoIP  
output, which goes to the USB headset.  The line in is only used for  
the iPhone.  The USB headset mic is used for VoIP.

Now, given this setup, here are the problems I've had:

Separately controlling volume of line in, and also setting line in  
into monitor mode (which redirects analog input directly to speakers  
without involving any digital data transfers to host, a hard  
requirement for me as I refuse to waste DMA/CPU resources and doing a  
wasted A/D then D/A conversion just to listen to my iPhone's  
playlists, he says as he listens to "We Made You" - Eminem).  Windows  
Vista does this just fine.  In order to get this under F11 I have to  
use gst-mixer.  And truly the same is viable for the CD in portion of  
a hardware mixer.  Every system I build still keeps the analog signal  
cable between the CD/DVD and the soundcard.  This doesn't help if I  
try to watch a movie as that signal has to be decoded and then played,  
but for audio CDs it is still a perfectly acceptable means of playing  
the music.  So I'm not sure where this "CD in is obsolete" comes  
from.  Even the motherboard I bought about 2 months ago still has a CD  
in port and the CD/DVD in that machine still has an analog output.

Getting PA to accept (and keep) the proper default input/output source  
across reboots, especially if the USB headset was either plugged in or  
unplugged at boot which changes the alsa detection order of the  
devices (this appears to be more reliable in F11 now, but was really  
bad in F9, I skipped F10).

Interestingly enough, at login now in F11, it plays a sound over the  
speakers, but also plays what sounds like undecoded noise over the USB  
headset.

I haven't tried reverting my .procmailrc of my secondary mail account  
to use paplay on certain messages again.  I have a workaround in  
place, but in the past, attempts to do so would delay mails for hours  
until I killed the hung paplay program.

--

Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>

GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
http://people.redhat.com/dledford

InfiniBand Specific RPMS
http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband




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