On Sat, 12.04.08 22:55, James Courtier-Dutton (James@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > That would be reasonable for consumer cards. Pro sound cards should > > never initialise themselves to anything other than minimum gain. > > > > John > > > > I think everyone is misunderstanding the issue here. > All ALSA sound cards, without any intervention from user space, will > boot up with ALL SOUND MUTED. > Most distros then have an /etc/init.d startup script that restores sound > card levels to the previous state before the previous power off. > The problem is, what to do the first time the system is installed. I.e. > No "previous state" exists. > a) General users will normally want some level of sound by default the > first time they boot into a newly installed system. > b) Professional users want everything muted the first time. > > My personal preference is ALL SOUND MUTED in ALL cases. > I figure that if a user does not have sound, the first thing they will > do is go to the volume control and turn it up! Thing is, that non-technical people usually have a very hard time to grok a mixer crowded with all kinds of controls where most of them actually don't have any impact on sound at all. In PA I try to minimize the number of sliders: just one per output device. PA is clearly not for pro-audio people, so this is the absolute right thing to do. But for this I need to be able to rely on that all the mixer controls of the soundcard are initialized in a "sane" way, so that the single mixer control I have actually makes sense. > Most consumer distos do not agree with me and want the volume turned up > already by default. Yes. in an ideal world people wouldn't have to think about the volume control in there computers at all, since their speakers either come with a hw vol control anyway, are a hifi stereo with hw vol controls or are inside a laptop with hw volume controls. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 _______________________________________________ Alsa-devel mailing list Alsa-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mailman.alsa-project.org/mailman/listinfo/alsa-devel
