Comment 13 for bug 1478506

"It's not more complicated, because SoundEffect and Audio *already both exist*. If they are supposed to use the same role, what is the point of them both existing?"

They both are intended for multimedia but the difference is on a technical level.
The Audio element is more suited for music. It provides metadata about the song it plays, reading ID3 tags from mp3 files and the like. This however makes it slow to load. The SoundEffect item instead is for sound effects. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles but is optimized for low latency. Still both are for playing audio in games/apps using the multimedia role.

If the SoundEffect would use the alert role it would be adjusted to the ringtone value. Why would you want that? I don't want to or lower the ringtone of the phone, I want to control the audio of the game. Having Audio and SoundEffect on different roles would be even more confusing as the hardware buttons sometimes would control the game's background music (which is normally using Audio) and sometimes the SoundEffects it plays.

I do agree that games should have in-game volume controls too. But that's quite unrelated. In the end we have two roles, alert (for ringtones of phone calls, SMS etc) and multimedia (music player, games music etc). Both can be controlled with the hardware buttons. This is fine in general, but the current implementation is not good enough. As you've pointed out there are multiple issues.

However, this discussion is getting quite off-topic on the original issue reported in the bug. We should probably continue it on the mailing list.