At Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:51:31 +0100, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
John L. Utz III wrote:
It appears to me that these functions are attempting to work on all of the channels at once instead of just choosing Master, Front, Rear, Surround, or what have you:
Yes, the "Master" control is one control with eight channels.
this leads to a rather awkward result in alsamixer where there are 5 volume controls called "Master":
< Master > Master Master Master Master
IMHO, it would be more desirable for them to say:
< Master > Front C/LFE Surround Rear Surr
Yes.
Alsamixer chooses to display an eight-channel control this way. This can be considered a bug in alsamixer.
The current ALSA mixer abstraction splits the multi-channels into separate paired channels. But alsamixer can't show the channel name due to its UI design. And I guess other mixer apps don't handle them properly, too (who would care?).
A solution would be make individual control like "Front", and create a virtual master control.
Takashi