Comment 4 for bug 49607

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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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