Hi folks, The way we control mic input is quite broken. I've tested here with both IDT codecs and Realtek codecs (the two most common HDA Codecs AFAIK) and as far as I see they're both broken in the same ways. Let's assume that we have an internal mic and an external mic jack, with autoswitching in the kernel. We have a "Mic Boost" affecting the external mic jack, a "Front Mic Boost" affecting internal mic, and a "Capture" control affecting both. "Mic Boost" and "Front Mic Boost" go from 0 to 60 dB in 20 dB steps, and "Capture" goes from 0 to 22.5 dB in 1.5 dB steps. 1) The first problem is PA is unable to combine both of them correctly: for the first 0 to 22.5 dB, PA moves the "Capture" control only. After that say at 25 dB, "Mic Boost" moves to +20 dB, keeping "Capture" at 22.5 dB, then using softvol to compensate, instead of lowering "Capture". I've been suggested that changing the order of "Mic Boost" and "Capture" improves this situation, so we should probably do that. Any objections? 2) The harder problem is that PulseAudio does not know whether to control "Mic Boost" or "Front Mic Boost", since it doesn't know what path is active at the moment. While we really need some kind of module, and appropriate kernel support, the question is what we do before that becomes sufficiently available. The next best solution, would probably be to have different profiles and manual autoswitching. While I yet have to look into the details, I guess we'll have to add different profiles for "Mic", "Front Mic", "Rear Mic" and so on, instead of having them in the same file as we have today. Any thoughts? 3) It'd be great if we could present something else than "Microphone 1", "Microphone 2" and so on when we have more than one mic input. Any idea of where this name actually comes from, and how we can make it better? Thanks/credits to Vitaliy Kulikov for helping with the analysis. -- David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd. http://launchpad.net/~diwic
