Inadequate sound device control

[Jonathan Kamens]

On 04/15/2012 02:12 PM, stan wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:32:27 -0400
> Jonathan Kamens <jik at kamens.us> wrote:
>> In particular, I would like to be able to control things at this
>> level:
> came through blank here
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/attachments/20120415/a0f1597e/attachment-0001.png 

>> Except (a) the alsamixer curses interface is hardly one that's easy
>> for random users to find, and (b) even in alsamixer, I have to hit F6
>> and select my sound card before I see the level of granularity shown
>> above.
> Use alsamixer -c <card number here, start from 0>
> You can find card numbers with
> aplay -l
> Once in alsamixer, F3 is playback, F4 is record, F5 is combined.
>
> For really detailed settings, install alsa-utils and use amixer.
I understand what you are saying, but you're missing the point. /It 
should not be this hard/ to access detailed sound settings. If Fedora is 
going to use pulseaudio, then pulseaudio needs to provide access to 
these settings.

These are not esoteric settings that only audiophiles use. I have to 
tweak them/regularly/ to get my speakers, headset, and microphone to 
play nicely together, due to another bug, i.e., that Fedora doesn't seem 
to /remember/ my settings between logins / reboots. But even if that bug 
weren't present and the settings were remembered, I would still need to 
tweak them at least once to set them properly the first time, and right 
now there's no way to do that through a GUI, whereas there was before 
when gmixer was supported. That's simply an unacceptable loss in basic 
functionality, which has been totally lost for at least two major 
releases now.

I love a lot of things about Fedora, but one of the things I absolutely 
hate is its penchant for ripping out things that work and replacing them 
with things that don't have nearly the same functionality, perhaps with 
an amorphous functionality to restore the missing functionality at some 
time in the indeterminate future.

   jik

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