On 13-04-08 17:17, stan wrote:
Rene Herman wrote:
On 13-04-08 12:51, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
It seems to me that whatever way you look at this, A default value of "MUTE" is really the only safe level for all sound card types.
Always good to be ignored. How about that card specific "defaults" setup that I suggested?
I think this would theoretically work, but it requires creating and maintaining a database of all sound cards. And if a card is not in the database, there still has to be a default behavior. ;-)
That default would just be "do nothing" -- ie, keep things muted as now.
Perhaps an entry could be added to the .asoundrc or asound.state file that sets this. Although the main time this is of import is the first time a sound card is used, so there would have to be a default entry :-). After that it retains its previous state and is not as important.
It looks like mute is a reasonable compromise, except for blind users.
For all I and most other sensible (and non-blind) people care, it is, but as James said, distributions disagree. Generally, it's possible to provide a set of reasonable "non-mute default" on a per card basis but ALSA is the only one that can do so. I don't believe that creating a default control settings file upon submission of a new driver would be unreasonable. We already have /usr/share/alsa/cards/<card>.conf as well. Keeping it in sync over changes to the driver might be a slight problem.
But, like you yourself conclude, in the end just changing nothing is the other option and that's something distribution disagree with. Not I...
Rene.