Update on audio, call for testers, and ponies

[Daniel Chen]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:04 PM, LoonyPhoenix<loonyphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> all I liked. Then PCM disappeared and only master volume and per-application
> volumes remained, and I had to be careful not to go above 85% when setting
> master volume and I was all right. However, now I have to make sure all
> applications don't go over 85%, and it's a pain, so I'll wind up disabling
> flat volumes even though I like them better now. Also, I think the feature

I have not seen or heard resounding protest regarding the upstream
default to use volume=merge[0]. The handful of Karmic testers (less
than one half-dozen who have contacted me directly, though I encourage
everyone to publicise her/his discontent with the default on
ubuntu-devel-discuss) who are annoyed by it have modified the
necessary conffile[0].

However, I am concerned with avoiding serious use case regressions.
Many people don't test Karmic until RC, so if they get volume=merge
and are dismayed, it will be a bit late to get an idea whether they
are "just" the vocal minority.

PulseAudio itself is very, very near to 0.9.16 final, and just about
every major set of hourly git commits have been in the
ubuntu-audio-dev PPA.

The next PA upload to Karmic will break with upstream in that we will
set volume=ignore, which is the closest to existing behaviour for all
Ubuntu releases shipping PulseAudio. If this behaviour is undesirable,
speak now or forever hold your peace.

-Dan

[0] Quoting from
/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common:

; When a device shall change its volume, PA will got through the list
; of all elements with "volume = merge" and set the volume on the
; first element. If that element does not support dB volumes, this is
; where the story ends. If it does support dB volumes, PA divides the
; requested volume by the volume that was set on this element, and
; then go on to the next element with "volume = merge" and then set
; that there, and so on.  That way the first volume element in the
; path will be the one that does the 'biggest' part of the overall
; volume adjustment, with the remaining elements usually being set to
; some value next to 0dB. This logic makes sure we get the full range
; over all volume sliders and a very high granularity of volumes
; already in hardware.
...
; volume = ignore | merge | off | zero   # What to do with this
volume: ignore it, merge it into the device
;                                        # volume slider, always set
it to the lowest value possible, or always
;                                        # set it to 0 dB (for
whatever that means)