** Description changed:

  1. Play a game that just plays occasional sound effects, not music.
  2. Try to change the volume of the sound effects.
  
  What should happen: You can.
  What actually happens: You can't unless you time it exactly right, pressing 
the volume controls while the sound effect is playing.
  
  For brief sounds (less than a second or so), like sound effects in a
  game or a messaging app, you probably won't be fast enough to change
  their volume while they're playing. So, you need to be able to change
  their volume even when they aren't playing.
  
  If you want to be able to do this with the hardware volume buttons, that
  means that by default (when no sound is playing), the hardware volume
  buttons should control the role that sound effects use.
  
  So, the current design is that this default role for volume controls
  should be "alert", and that sound effects should use "alert".
  <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#primary-output>
  
  Unfortunately, this doesn't work at the moment because the Qt
  SoundEffect API <http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-multimedia.html#soundeffect>
- produces sounds that use do not use the "alert" role, but rather
+ produces sounds that do not use the "alert" role, but rather
  "multimedia". Because this is not the default role, the hardware volume
  buttons control the volume of sound effects only during the brief
- moments when the sound effects are actually playing.
+ moments when the sound effects are actually playing, which is unhelpful.
  
- I see three ways to resolve this bug:
- A. Decide that you should not, in fact, be able to change the volume of sound 
effects using the hardware buttons when sound effects aren't playing.
- B. Combine the "alert" and "multimedia" roles. That would have the drawback 
that you couldn't change sound effect volume independent of music that was 
playing in the background (but maybe that's not a big deal).
- C. Change the SoundEffect API implementation so that it uses the "alert" role 
by default.
+ Some possible ways to resolve this bug:
+ 
+ A. Decide that you should not, in fact, be able to change the volume of
+ sound effects using the hardware buttons when sound effects aren't
+ playing. Drawback: Annoying.
+ 
+ B. Change the SoundEffect API implementation so that it uses the "alert"
+ role by default. Drawback: You couldn't silence sound effects without
+ silencing the ringtone too. (Unless the ringtone was moved to a
+ different role.)
+ 
+ C. Change the default role to "multimedia". Drawback: Not clear what
+ "alert" would actually include any more.
+ 
+ D. Combine the "alert" and "multimedia" roles. Drawback: You couldn't
+ change sound effect volume independent of music that was playing in the
+ background (but maybe that's not a big deal).
  
  (This is a followup to bug 1478506.)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1498466

Title:
  Default audio role for volume controls isn't the role that sound
  effects use

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