12.02.2014 02:14, I wrote: > 11.02.2014 20:03, Tanu Kaskinen wrote: >> We want to support: >> * A single main output volume control. Think of things like the >> Gnome volume applet: when you click the applet icon, you get a single >> volume slider for controlling the "current output", whatever that >> means. The Gnome volume applet implements the main volume by using >> the default sink volume, but we'd like to make the main volume >> contextual, so that the main volume can control different things at >> different times. Ideally the contextual logic would be implemented in >> PulseAudio (by a policy module), not in the volume applet. The volume >> applet should know when the main volume controls e.g. the headphones >> volume or the phone call volume. > > I tried to answer this with the following worry: the main volume may > be something to which the usual slider-based paradigm and the > corresponding "get and set a floating-point value" does not > necessarily apply. In particular, I was going to talk about the > "thumbwheel" from the paper that the proponents of flat volumes use as > their scientific basis. Please ignore this worry, and sorry for the noise. I came to the conclusion that the thumbwheel idea in the paper is a fallacy directly following from the fact that the author forgot to ask (and answer) a simple question: what would be the loudness of a newly started application that was never seen before. Once you have an answer to this question, you have a slider and don't need a thumbwheel anymore to control the loudness of all applications at once, and thus don't need any sort of increment-based volume API. -- Alexander E. Patrakov
