On Sun, 26.04.09 11:46, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > Lennart Poettering wrote: > > Oh great. This sounds like an invitation to stop working on cleaning > > up the volume control situation entirely. If we never can get rid of > > the old cruft and need to prominently feature it in all future release > > then why even try? > > I think that's the whole point here. We can NEVER get rid of those sliders, > they all exist for a reason. (Well, almost – I'm sure there's one or the > other bogus dummy control in some driver, but those are ALSA bugs. Showing > sliders which actually do something is NOT a bug.) Uh. We certainly can get rid of them. Many of the more modern HDA designs got rid of the entire volume control logic and instead increased the PCM bit depth to 24 bit everywhere of which the usual 4-8 bit headroom can be used for volume control. In ALSA these are all those devices where the 'softvol' module does volume control. Gazillions of controls are *not* necessary. Only if you buy a Creative sound card these days you still get such an immsense number of those controls. But that's simply because otherwise there is nothing that would distuingish them from onboard audio. All machines today come with onboard sound cards whith quality nobody could ever complain about. Today we have MMX and SSE and similar CPU extensions. The very reason we have them is to do signal processing with them. Such as implementing mixing, volume adjustments, equalizers, and other filters in them -- in high digital quality. Ironically even Creative sees that and nowadays a lot of logic is actually in their Windows drivers, not so much in their sound cards. The only controls that are really necessary are NOT those which control signal processing but those which control routing. And of those the ones which make sense already are (like the spdif controls) or will be (like input switching) exposed by PA. So, you said 'they exist for a reason'. Yes and that reason often has to do more with marketing than with technical reasons. And since PA is not a marketing tool I won't buy into those. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
