Rawhide: pulseaudio and emu10k1 problems

[Steve Hill]

I've just installed Monday's rawhide on a machine with a SB Live 
(emu10k1) sound card and have stumbled across several sound problems:

1. Pulseaudio only sees the front 2 speakers of the emu10k1 - the 
workaround for this is to add "default-sample-channels = 4" to 
/etc/pulse/daemon.conf, but this changes the number of channels seen on 
all the other sound cards in the machine too, which may not be what you 
want.  "aplay -L" does list a 4 channel "surround40:CARD=Live,DEV=0" 
subdevice - if we can't reliably auto-select the right subdevice, how 
about at least letting the user select it from the GUI?

2. The EMU10K1 mixer routing is rather broken - the "Master" mixer channel 
only controls the front speakers, leaving the rear speakers to be 
controlled by the "Surround" channel.  Thus the "Master" channel should 
really be renamed to "Front" and a real "Master" channel that controls 
everything should be added.  It is a bit of a pain having to adjust 2 
channels at the same time in order to change the volume.  Similarly, the 
PCM channel only controls the front channels - surely this should control 
*all* the PCM channels?

3. gnome-sound-properties allows configuration of the "Default Mixer 
Tracks", but this does not affect which tracks mixer_applet2 (which is 
present in the system tray by default) controls.  mixer_applet2 has its 
own configuration - some unification is needed here.

4. gnome-sound-properties is accessed under System -> Prefs -> Hardware -> 
Sound but it allows configuration of the system sounds.  The system sounds 
have as little to do with your sound hardware as the desktop background 
has to do with your video hardware so it seems rather non-intuitive.  The 
system sounds configuration should really be separated from the devices 
configuration and moved into somewhere like Look & Feel.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence