On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 11:03 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
So, in the spirit of light rather than heat, here's my proposal,
again,
rescued from the depths of the flamefest, with some actual work
attached.
g-v-c is clearly intending to be an abstracted and simplified volume
control app / applet to cover the most common use cases in a friendly
way. Great.
It's clear, though, that some users have needs beyond this, which are
likely only going to be satisfied in a sensible way by access direct to
the ALSA mixer elements. Bastien and Lennart don't want some kind of
hack to expose these via g-v-c, and I'd tend to agree, that's clearly
not what it's designed for.
Hello, Hi! It's me, the foul-mouthed purveyor of said infamous thread.
Just so we're clear, my irritation has nothing to do with mixer
applications. I'm perfectly happy firing up alsamixer in a terminal if I
need raw access to ALSA mixer. In fact, I found the "classic" GNOME
mixer completely useless, as it hid from me any and all numbers
indicating what anything is actually set to. At least throw me a bone
and give me a percentage. (Actual dB readings? I've died and gone to
heaven!)
No, I am concerned purely with the panel applet. I want to place my
mouse cursor over the speaker icon on the panel, and roll the scroll
wheel to adjust the PCM level. Whatever it takes to do that, I don't
care.
(Though I also don't want in-application volume sliders screwing with
master either. So at the very least, flat volumes are out...)
I'd also like keyboard volume buttons to do likewise, but this
particular machine has a vintage 1986 IBM Model M on it so the panel
applet just works out better...
So my proposal is that we include by default an alternative GUI app
which allows direct access to the mixer channels. This won't be an
applet or anything else persistent, just an application that you can
choose to run if you need that level of access.
This does absolutely nothing to address my concerns.
So I suggest what we should do is resurrect gnome-alsamixer. It's
still
technically part of GNOME - it's even got moved to the new GNOME git.
Other distributions still package it (Debian, for e.g.) It's even had a
few commits within the last year or so. It was more or less deprecated
in favour of g-v-c, but now we have a case where it may make sense to
have two clearly differentiated apps, and gnome-alsamixer is the obvious
choice.
I want the functionality of the old *panel applet* back. gnome-alsamixer
does absolutely nothing to make me happy.