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

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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