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< Features
Volume Control
Summary
Owner
- Name: LennartPoettering, BastienNocera
Current status
- Targeted release:
- Last updated: 2008-05-29
- Percentage of completion: 0%
Detailed Description
With the use of PulseAudio by default, it makes sense to no longer expose the unintuitive plethora of volume controls and channels that alsa exports, and which is currently reflected 1-1 in the gnome volume control tools (gnome-volume-control and mixer applet). PulseAudio already ships with a volume control app, pavucontrol, that is packaged for Fedora (but not installed by default).
- Graphical mixers (such as the volume applet, the mixer, and the multimedia keys handler) should be restricted to modifying PulseAudio's default output's mixer.
- The control-center's sound setup tools should react to hardware hotplug (Bluetooth headsets/headphones, USB sound cards and webcams with microphones).
- The control-center should also allow basic microphone checking
- The control-center should allow tweaking of multi-inputs/outputs policies (play music to all devices, play only to headphones, etc.)
Benefit to Fedora
The multimedia experience of Fedora users is improved by an easily understandable and much more flexible volume control model.
Scope
Affected modules are:
- kernel (ALSA) which should trim the number of user visible hardware channels
- PulseAudio to allow supporting features in the front-ends
- gst-plugins-pulse should support setting application specific volumes
- gnome-volume-control will need application audio tracks support
- gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-applets might need changes to force the use of PulseAudio
Test Plan and User Experience
TODO update
- Verify that pavucontrol is in the default install instead of gnome-volume-control, and the mixer applet on the panel is the new one.
- Verify that pavucontrol and the new mixer applet allow to control the volume of streams and devices; also make sure that feedback works correctly (ie changing the volume in the mixer applet should be reflected in a concurrently running pavucontrol, and vice versa)
- Verify that volume settings are remembered across logouts and reboots
Dependencies
Only some PulseAudio changes are needed to get the work started. Some policy decisions will be harder to
Contingency Plan
Front-end changes would be backed out.