[gentoo-user] ALSA, speakers, volume, mute

2007-11-17 Thread Thufir
After mucking about with alsamixer and various control-panel type things 
in GNOME, sound works and I can play mp3's.  On the one hand, great.  On 
the other, why are there multiple mute buttons and volume controls?  
That's a really weird idea, that unmute must, apparently, be checked in 
multiple locations.  Aaaargh.


-Thufir

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Re: [gentoo-user] ALSA, speakers, volume, mute

2007-11-17 Thread Alan McKinnon
On Saturday 17 November 2007, Thufir wrote:
 After mucking about with alsamixer and various control-panel type
 things in GNOME, sound works and I can play mp3's.  On the one hand,
 great.  On the other, why are there multiple mute buttons and volume
 controls? That's a really weird idea, that unmute must, apparently,
 be checked in multiple locations.  Aaaargh.

Think about this a little bit. Modern audio hardware has multiple inputs 
and often multiple outputs as well.

You absolutely need to be able to control these independantly, because 
that's the way stuff works. Maybe you have a mic and a cd-rom as 
inputs, how could you possibly control them with one input? Think audio 
mixing hardware - many inputs. You have to be able to mute or unmute 
them individually. You can't link the volume controls so one slider 
controls everything becuase electronic devices don't increase and 
decrease the amount of signal exactly the same way.

Any attempt to give you an audio control that works in a different way 
to what you have will be horribly broken and unusable. Then you really 
would be have something to complain about.

Bitching here about this is a bit like moaning that you have 6 lights on 
in your house and to get darkness you have to switch on 6 switches in 
different places. Silly, huh?

alan


-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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