'Twas brillig, and Jud Craft at 27/05/09 04:06 did gyre and gimble: > Actually, wait. There is one last thing that might clue me in. > > Let's say I have, relative to each other, Firefox/youTube set to 100% > and Banshee set to 80%. > > Now, imagine I'm listening to Banshee and my volume is 100%. Does > flat volume mean that if I start to play a Firefox video...that > Firefox will be at 100% and that Pulse will intelligently drop Banshee > to 80%? > > In essence...applying my per-app ratios automatically on the fly, > whenever something comes up? I'll be honest, I didn't really think of > it like -that-. That sounds awesome enough that I might need to give > it another chance. Yes! The way I understand it, and apologies if I'm wrong here, is that Banshess want's 80% and it's the only app playing. In order to achieve that result, pulse does not scale the stream at all but sets the underlying hardware volume to 80% (but in dB's yada yada!). So the net result is I get sound at the right volume. Then another stream joins that wants 100% So, pulse with start scaling the Banshee stream to ensure it is scaled in software to 80%, and turn up the underlying hardware volume to 100%. Net result is that Banshee continues playing at the same level and sounds the same but the new stream can be louder. Essentially, whenever possible pulse is off-loading the scaling to the h/w, meaning less work in software = less load, and better quality audio due to the use of the full range of the DAC. Hope that's right! Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
