Fedora Rant #3 - why are the sound controls so weird?

[Tim]

On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 16:34 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> System Settings=>Soundcard Detection
> strikes me as completely useless.
> What exactly is the point of it?
> Has anyone ever found it of any use?

>From what I recall, that's for configuring ye olde non-plug-n-play ISA
sound cards that didn't get automatically set up during OS installation.

> I have a Sound icon (a loudspeaker) in my panel,
> and if I right click on this and choose Show Mixer Window
> a KMix window comes up with a large selection of controls,
> all of which are more or less meaningless to me.

I don't use KDE, but I do notice quite a few weird options in the mixer
available to Gnome (igain, phin, phout, etc.; and I can guess the ph
ones might have something to do with phones and modems, some make no
sense to me, nor do the guides for the mixer program give details).

> What does a right-angle triangle, half-shaded in green,
> with a letter b on the hypotenuse, mean?
> Does this symbol have some universal significance?

I'd *guess* bass (tone controls).  If I saw an adjacent one with a T for
treble, I'd be fairly sure of the guess.

> What does "FM Legacy" mean?

I'd guess to do with ye olde sound cards that used FM synthesis tone
generation (similar to how modern cards use PCM with their internal MIDI
generators).

> What does it mean to set this control to say 55% ?

It's output level is 55% amplitude, would be my guess.

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