'Twas brillig, and Arun Raghavan at 10/10/10 11:30 did gyre and gimble: > On Sun, 2010-10-10 at 10:46 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote: > [...] >> I'd also like to expose a new constant in the headers called >> PA_VOLUME_OVERDRIVE (or similarly named) that represents +11dB and >> should be our generally recommended "overdrive" (aka software >> amplification > 100%) amount for volume control UIs. >> >> Currently gnome-volume-control allows up to PA_VOLUME_NORM*1.5 which is >> ~= +11dB via current mappings, which is one reason why we previously >> decided on +11dB as our overdrive amount. That said, other volume >> control UIs (pavucontrol, kmix and, surprisingly, >> gnome-volume-control-applet) only allow volumes up to PA_VOLUME_NORM, so >> the idea would be to allow them to go right up to PA_VOLUME_OVERDRIVE, >> and hopefully implement an appropriate use of colours and markers etc. >> to make it clear to the user that they may not want to go >100% or risk >> clipping. >> >> http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/WritingVolumeControlUIs#Colouredvolumesliders > > Sounds reasonable. Although, independent of the rest of these changes, > I'd also like to propose that the max. s/w gain (i.e. PA_VOLUME_MAX) be > decreased from its current value (~289 dB now, ~271 dB with my change) > to something more reasonable, like ~20 dB. > > I came to this conclusion the hard way - while testing these patches, I > managed to turn up the volume high enough to temporarily damage my > hearing (it was a sudden burst, and I got to the off switch in time, so > no permanent damage done, I hope). Urk! I'll try and type quietly... > I understand that some overdrive is useful in general, but are there any > objections to capping the max. to something like ~20 dB? I think that imposing a more sensible limit probably makes sense. I can't think of any practical reasons to push things to dB's > 20 ish so on the whole I'd be in favour of a more sensible upper limit. Quite what that limit should be however is perhaps debatable so other opinions should maybe be canvassed to get the final 20dB upper limit. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]