30 Sep
2008
30 Sep
'08
7:51 p.m.
On Tue, 30.09.08 23:41, hollunder(a)gmx.at (hollunder(a)gmx.at) wrote:
padevchooser (i.e. the "pa device chooser") is obsolete. People
shouldn't ship that at all.
pavucontrol is the only tool that matters. On Fedora it is the default
volume control (at least in GNOME).
Also, the current version of pavucontrol has a button for showing the
menu to make thinks more accesible.
I am wondering why Ubuntu Studio is shipping PA at all. PA is not
useful for audio production.
So, hey ho.
There's no accounting for distributions.
Nice utility. I installed it from the Ubuntu 8.04 repo; the first
time I ran it (in a system where the soundcards were already being
hogged by Flash and JACK and thus Pulse hadn't been able to open any
outputs) it crashed on startup in a string assignment (segv in
Glib::ustring::operator=, no other debug symbols available I'm
afraid), but it worked when run against a working PulseAudio daemon.
I assume the Ubuntu package isn't the freshest anyway.
Chris
You're right that it's badly integrated. I don't know regular ubuntu
but ubuntu studio. There you need to start the 'pulse audio device
chooser' which starts the tray icon. rightclick on it does nothing,
left click opens the menu (that's where the fun UI-part starts IMHO..).
Then the user gets a list of other apps to start, most of them likely
unneeded. 'Volume control' (pavucontrol) is pretty much the only ui the
user needs. There's the next strange thing: half the functionality is
'hidden' behind the (IMHO unusual) right-click on various parts of the
ui. Yes, there's a hint on the bottom of the window, but still.. So yes, the ui is useful, but could be more useful (I
wish I had a 5.1
to 2 downmix option in there :)), the ui could imho be better and it
could be far better integrated in the DE.
Note that this refers to the version in Ubuntu 8.04, I haven't seen any
other.
There will be an option to change the output port for a sound card
on-the-fly. I.e. from stereo analog, to 5.1 analog to spdif and
back. But that still needs time since ALSA currently doesn't have an
API that exports that information in a useful way.
Lennart
--
Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553
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