2010/6/14 Colin Guthrie gmane@colin.guthr.ie
'Twas brillig, and Raymond Yau at 14/06/10 13:36 did gyre and gimble:
2010/6/14 James Courtier-Dutton james.dutton@gmail.com
On 14 June 2010 11:22, Colin Guthrie gmane@colin.guthr.ie wrote:
'Twas brillig, and James Courtier-Dutton at 14/06/10 09:56 did gyre and gimble:
If you use "alsamixer", dB values are shown so it is easy to find the 0dB "sweet spot". I think it is pulse audio that hides this information when it combines two alsa mixer controls into one pulseaudio control.
But it doesn't hide it. It's shown very clearly in the volume control GUIs as the Base Volume.
Do you really think that most users look at the sliders to find the 0dB point? Does gnome-alsa-mixer (the old one) expose this information? No. Does kmix? No. So the vast, vast majority of users do not know where
the
0dB point is unless they use alsamixer.... and even if the user is advanced enough to use alsamixer, then I'd still say a proportion of users are just looking at how far up the slider is rather than looking specifically for 0dB.
So I'd argue the exact opposite of your claim. That with the base
volume
clearly presented in the GUI, the h/w 0dB spot is much, much more obvious to the vast majority of users.
I really think this is a vast improvement over a complex balancing act of getting two different sliders setup to get distortion free audio!
Col
One has very different problems with capture than one does with
playback.
With capture it is important to identify which are analog controls (applied to the analog part of the circuit) and which are digital controls (applied to the digital part of the circuit) So, for capture one might wish to adjust the analog control so that the signal going into the ADC is a suitable level, but once the signal is digital, one should really not adjust it further, and just record what you have. If one was to combine these two capture controls in one PA control, it would just be wrong.
The AC97 recording from line-in problem seem not related to capture gain since you can set capture volume to 0dB
The HDA 's "PCM" softvol plugin is different from AC97 "PCM" Playback
volume
But you can change the softvol plugin to add gain to emulate the clipping
in
software side if PA developers did not have ac97 sound card ( clipping
occur
in hardware side )
/usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf
HDA-Intel.pcm.front.0 { @args [ CARD ] @args.CARD { type string } type softvol slave.pcm { type hw card $CARD } control { name "PCM Playback Volume" card $CARD }
min_dB -46.5max_dB 12.0resolution 32}
I've made this change on my system and while previously my UI had no "Base Volume" displayed (because all my "h/w" (I include softvol in that) controls had their dB value >0.
as your card has no h/w gain, > 0dB , but the gain in softvol plugin is a software gain (i.e. in the red region in PA "s volume scale
how can base_volume display in gnome volume control (unamplified) ?
BTW , -46.5dB to 0dB of softvol plugin is software atten ( not h/w atten )
Now that this change is live, I have a base volume present in my GUI (at around the 64% mark with the cubic scale we've already discussed). When I set my volume ot the base volume, the h/w controls are all set to 0dB which is exactly as expected.
I fail to see the point here? The base volume is clearly exposed to the as the recommended point on the scale at which no clipping occurs.
I really don't get where your complaint is.
Col