On Sat, 12.04.08 22:55, James Courtier-Dutton (James@superbug.co.uk) wrote:
That would be reasonable for consumer cards. Pro sound cards should never initialise themselves to anything other than minimum gain.
John
I think everyone is misunderstanding the issue here. All ALSA sound cards, without any intervention from user space, will boot up with ALL SOUND MUTED. Most distros then have an /etc/init.d startup script that restores sound card levels to the previous state before the previous power off. The problem is, what to do the first time the system is installed. I.e. No "previous state" exists. a) General users will normally want some level of sound by default the first time they boot into a newly installed system. b) Professional users want everything muted the first time.
My personal preference is ALL SOUND MUTED in ALL cases. I figure that if a user does not have sound, the first thing they will do is go to the volume control and turn it up!
Thing is, that non-technical people usually have a very hard time to grok a mixer crowded with all kinds of controls where most of them actually don't have any impact on sound at all.
In PA I try to minimize the number of sliders: just one per output device. PA is clearly not for pro-audio people, so this is the absolute right thing to do. But for this I need to be able to rely on that all the mixer controls of the soundcard are initialized in a "sane" way, so that the single mixer control I have actually makes sense.
Most consumer distos do not agree with me and want the volume turned up already by default.
Yes. in an ideal world people wouldn't have to think about the volume control in there computers at all, since their speakers either come with a hw vol control anyway, are a hifi stereo with hw vol controls or are inside a laptop with hw volume controls.
Lennart