New Volume Control Interface For GNOME

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New Volume Control Interface For GNOME

One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13379

[kiwi_kid_aka_bod]

Just one comment/criticism: Why in the hell have they rotated the volume control from the system tray?

It doesn't really add anything, and now I have two travel in two directions to adjust the level: Down, Left/Right finding the grab, versus Up/Down.

Mentally the vertical orientation is also simpler to grasp, versus left-or-right, scan-for-icon, see-the-plus, translate, ok-drag-right-to-turn-volume-up palava

:(

Other than that, it looks pretty good, though I do hope apps linger in the tab for a while, so if it plays a short sound at full volume, I'd like to be able to change it after the fact, so it doesn't wake the neighbors next time.

PS. This kind of change on such a fundamental control should be forbidden unless a proper usability review is undertaken showing that the usability is improved.

[RealNC]

This would be awesome if you could simply use the mouse wheel to up/down the volume without getting confused with all the directions...

[kiwi_kid_aka_bod]

This would be awesome if you could simply use the mouse wheel to up/down the volume without getting confused with all the directions...

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?

Yes, I know my wheel turns the volume up/down. My mother probably doesn't, and she's pretty good at figuring things out. She tells me horror stories such as people attaching 20 files to an email one at a time at her work.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean
a) it's known,
b) it's obvious if it's not known, or
c) it's a good idea to change established practices just because someone feels like it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there any other significant OS where the master volume control is horizontal?

[n0nsense]

First, i want to address previous post.
You can use scroll wheel when your cursor over volume applet.
No real need to open it. Same with amarok tray icon.

And now the interesting questions.
1. Balance control is nice, but what if you have more channels ? like 5.1 or 7.1 which is kind of standard ?

What about things like assigning output/input device on per application basis ? For example, I have HP xw4300 as my HTPC. It has integrated sound card with integrated speaker which is very good for things like Skype (ringing) and using it with front panel input/output jacks, but things like movies, music games and more, i want through dedicated sound card.
It is configurable now in some applications, and some working with gnome sound settings, but there is now easy way that i found to switch output device on the fly for some application. For example,I browsing net on HTPC and my browser sound outputted through integrated soundcard, but then i open some online radio (like last.fm) and i want to turn on my receiver and switch output device.
Currently it takes a lot of effort.
Will this things addressed in this redesign ?

[kiwi_kid_aka_bod]

First, i want to address previous post.
You can use scroll wheel when your cursor over volume applet.
No real need to open it. Same with amarok tray icon.

Eh! I said:
Yes, I know my wheel turns the volume up/down.

Or do you mean the previous, previous post by RealNC? I think s/he was being sarcastic, with the trailing dots at the end of the sentence.

The rest of your post: Yes agree totally.

[n0nsense]

Eh! I said:


Or do you mean the previous, previous post by RealNC? I think s/he was being sarcastic, with the trailing dots at the end of the sentence.

The rest of your post: Yes agree totally.

It was about RealNC's sarcastic post :)
I'm almost 12 hours at work after very happy night, so at some point, the ability to understand sarcasm and humor was lost

[cruiseoveride]

gnome is really becoming dependency hell.

I absolutely loathe pulseaudio.

[apaige]

"becoming"?

[williamthrilliam]

Linux audio is in a sorry state. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels that audio was better a year ago than it is today. I have seen more than one distro now tout "rock solid audio" or the like, and I have yet to get stable skype or flash audio. Some of you might direct me to a forum where it describes the 100 steps it takes to get these things working, but I don't want to have to do that. It should work. I read a nice blog that described exactly how I felt in more technical terms here: http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/01/dark-art-of-sound-on-linux.html .

[RussDill]

The thing that burns me the most is that the mixer is gone. alsa/hda-intel is still missing the piece that turns of the speakers when headphones are plugged in, so I need to do it manually. Now I can't (unless I use the curses alsamixer), not only that, I can do things like adjust input levels independently, turn on/off mic amp, etc, etc, etc.

I seriously don't care about independently adjusting volume for applications much less different alert sounds. The only thing to me that is nice about pulse is that I can easily move music or video streams to a network or bluetooth sink.

And yes, the change of the volume control from up/down to left/right seems incredibly stupid, especially since many cultures read from right to left instead of left to right.

The volume control properties applet itself looks like a UI hell as well.

[MamiyaOtaru]

Pulse Audio is useless. Unless padsp is significantly better than aoss (I see no indications that it is), I can find no reason at all to use it.

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-will-not-drink-koolaide.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/soapbox/402555-pulseaudio.html#post1912863

I also loved the way the volume control appeared underneath and nicely aligned with the systray icon in Gnome. It was held up as an example of a little thing that was done right - in short: polish. So much for that I guess.

[Kano]

I guess it is used for sound on X terminals - via network.

[hdas]

i don't like pulseaudio too. have been very happy with alsa directly. pulseaudio has issues with skype for me and volume control is a mess. unfortunately, packages in ubuntu are very dependent on pulseaudio. in fact, i cannot login into gnome without the script /usr/bin/pulse-session :o. so here's what it did to get rid of pulse. i uninstalled pulseaudio-esound-compat and installed esound and in the script /usr/bin/pulse-session, i commented out the line that starts pulseaudio :D.

more pulse and gnome cribbing :
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/10/pulse-my-audio.html
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-write-gnome-application.html
.

[curaga]

I believe NAS (network audio system) is better than Pulseaudio for thin clients. Maybe that's just the fact I've also been bitten by pulse.

[DanL]

GREAT, now I can't access the GNOME sound preferences. I click the button and nothing happens. I don't have PulseAudio (or ALSA) installed. I use OSS4. What happened to software freedom/choice? What happened to modularity?

Pulse Audio is useless.
It has its place, but most users don't need it and it shouldn't be installed by default in mainstream distros (nor should mainstream desktop environments depend on it). GNOME realized it needed to obsolete ESD, but it should have implemented a gstreamer-based (read: sound API agnostic) alternative instead of slapping a band-aid on with P.A. Similarly, if ALSA/dmix wasn't working properly, the correct solution would have been to fix it, instead of slapping another layer of garbage (P.A.) on top of it.

[WSmart]

Not a very newsworthy story, but it's certainly a hot button topic.

The best way to avoid frustration with pulse audio and in general with our evolving open source software is to have more than one machine, virtual or physical. The idea is flexibility. You can adapt your computing habits to work around some of the issues and you don't get stuck with a system that has no sound.

When I moved to Linux, I built a new machine for that and used a KVM switch to connect the two, so I never lost the functionality of the old system. I've had lots of issues with the sound on my Linux system, but I just move whatever I'm doing to the other machine. I don't need another machine, but I'm using that as a carrot to learn virtual computing. Virtual computing is a similar idea, using multiple operating systems to crack the nut.

I think open source software has helped change the way we think of an operating system, from being the warden of the hardware that determines what you can do with your hardware, to being just software. If you like the idea of having a warden, try Windows, jail or just married. :)

Be real, be sober.

[reavertm]

They have new volume control interface in Gnome? I'm jus... WOW...can't..I'm out...I'm out of my words. Is this complete changelog for new Gnome release or there's even more?

[Abraxas]

I have no need for pulseaudio. ALSA works fine. The only thing I can see being worthwhile is controlling the volume level for applications independently. With Gentoo I have fully funtioning sound with "-pulseaudio" USE flag set. It's one of the advantages of Gentoo, not having to worry about what your distro came prepackaged with.

[pirast]

sorry but where is the UI love? the volume slider is horizontally aligned now, the button in that dialog looks weird and the balance-chooser (http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=gnome_sound_control&image=gnome_sound_4_lrg) neither shows percentages nor has a button to set it to 0% which means that when you change the balance, it is very hard to bring it back to a normal state.

[jspaleta]

Is what you are seeing in your Ubuntu screenshots a glimpse of upstream Gnome work.. or is what you are seeing an Ubuntu specific customization?

The upstream developer for the gnome-media component weights in here:

http://www.hadess.net/2009/01/nb-it-doesnt-actually-look-like-that.html

"Ubuntu's mixer applet is a different UI on the old mixer applet in gnome-applets, and not the PulseAudio-powered volume applet now in gnome-media.

In addition to the article being outdated (the treeview with the one-by-one sound event customisation is already gone), it also invents new features such as «the ability to adjust the alert volume on a per-alert basis». God knows where they got that from.

/The guy who did the last gnome-media release"

How much of the Gnome UI in Ubuntu is customized and how much of it is representative of upstream development? Be wary of attributing downstream customizations to upstream development focus.

-jef