[Gtick-devel] Volume slider proposal

[Roland Stigge]

Hi,

we currently have some problems with the volume slider:

(1) Some drivers don't support it the way GTick uses it (as proposed by
the OSS programmer's manual) although dedicated mixer applications work
with the respective devices

(2) If I want to implement native ALSA support for GTick (instead of
just using the OSS emulation of ALSA), I would also have to implement
the mixer code for ALSA. Currently, ALSA doesn't provide a convenient
mixer interface.

(3) Sound programming guidelines usually state that volume control is
the job of separate mixer programs. As stated before, IMHO they are
right. It's difficult to support all mixers of all devices, and the UNIX
philosophy states that a program should do on task well.

My proposal:

Remove the device dependent (OSS) mixer / volume control code from GTick
and replace it with a waveform specific one. This way, the user would
have to set the mixer once (as he does for other applications) to the
maximum value allowed for Master+PCM (and therefore for GTick). The
volume slider of GTick would just influence the volume local to GTick,
i.e. it would directly influence the waveform by scaling.

This would solve _all_ the above stated problems and users would still
have a volume control.

Feedback welcome. If nobody objects, I will probably implement this idea
in the next version of GTick together with native ALSA support.

bye,
  Roland

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