Missing PCM volume control limits laptop sound volume

I concur that not displaying all the mixer elements in the graphical volume control applet by default causes some head-scratching. On the other hand, there are sound drivers (snd_emu10k1 in particular) that populate mixer elements to such a degree that showing them in the applet causes the related symptom of "but which of these fifteen controls do I use?!" Further complications include the fact that while with your hardware you can detect no audible distortion at PCM 90%+, there are chipsets (ones driven by snd_emu10k1 or snd_via82xx in particular) that most certainly do exhibit distortion at comparable levels. And, not to beat a dead horse, not all drivers enumerate the same mixer elements.

Essentially what you're wishlisting is a more intuitive method of controlling the perceived volume, which means a lot more leg work for the volume control applet. Does this sort of discovery belong in the applet? That's arguable. This issue may be addressed via a sound troubleshooter as I've set down on my wiki page.

i guess the guilty one is the sound applet of gnome, so assigning to gnome-applets...

I'd like to suggest that this be reclassified as a bug rather than a wishlist item. Although it's not a bug with any one particular component involved, it is a bug in Ubuntu.

The reason I say this it that using Ubuntu as intended, my laptop is too quiet to be useful despite the hardware being capable of adequite volume.

I suppose this hinges on whether or not you consider it a bug that (a) the speakers are too quiet to be uesful, and (b) the solution involves the user running alsaconf from the cmd-line. But it seems to me that in this regard Dapper doesn't give the intended user experience.

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Christian Convey wrote:
> I'd like to suggest that this be reclassified as a bug rather than a
> wishlist item. Although it's not a bug with any one particular
> component involved, it is a bug in Ubuntu.

It's a wishlist severity bug -- still a bug.

[snip]
> I suppose this hinges on whether or not you consider it a bug that (a)
> the speakers are too quiet to be uesful, and (b) the solution involves
> the user running alsaconf from the cmd-line. But it seems to me that in
> this regard Dapper doesn't give the intended user experience.

I agree that it can be befuddling. To address your points:

(a) Setting a default of "too quiet" arguably is better than "too loud".
Some hardware does Bad Things when set too loud, while I've not heard of
any equipment being damaged when the levels are too quiet. Again, the
matrix of possible "good" levels is /huge/.

(b) Ubuntu doesn't ship alsaconf; I presume you meant alsamixer? Take
for example the instance where the mixer applet by default would
enumerate 'Master', 'PCM', and 'Wave'. Now which of these would a "new
user" twiddle? While presenting the option{,s} up front, is this
complexity any more intuitive? Again, there's no guarantee each sound
driver even provides said elements or even if each element acts as its
name suggests. [One might then argue that the element names should be
changed to reflect more accurately their usage, which reintroduces the
problem of level consistency across dist-upgrades, as it depends on
names remaining consistent...]

The crux of the matter is that neither issue is resolved easily, so the
best -- at this point -- that can be done is to attempt to further
abstract away the complexity from the user, which means making $tool do
the hard work...

Thanks,
- --
Daniel T. Chen <email address hidden>
GPG key: www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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That's not a gnome-applets bug, what would you expect from the applet? It controls a channel by default, you can change that channel if you want. You can also left double click or right click on it to open the mixer. Your complain seems to be about the default alsa value rather, reassigning to alsa

I didn't realize that the PCM volume could be controlled via the applet. That takes away the main premise of my original bug report: that there's no way to adjust PCM volume in order to let my laptop have a sufficient overall speaker volume.

I guess if I have any lingering suggestion, it would be that it become more obvious to users that the applet has a way of controlling the PCM volume. When I right click, the "Open Volume Control..." option is worded such that I just assumed it would bring up the same single slider that I get if I left-click on the applet. That wording probably contributed to my confusion that led to this bug report.

Between ongoing upstream git work and pavucontrol's integration, we shouldn't have to consider this a "bug".