2010/6/17 James Courtier-Dutton james.dutton@gmail.com
On 17 June 2010 00:34, Raymond Yau superquad.vortex2@gmail.com wrote:
2010/6/17 Colin Guthrie gmane@colin.guthr.ie
But this sucks as the percentage shown in alsa is not the same as the percentage shown in other GUIs.
alsamixer and amixer 's percentage were not designed as your purpose
Have you studied the source code of alsamixer and amixer
the alsa developers have already posted a lot of time in the mailist list
,
they prefer to use dB scale instead of percentage
That is exactly why percentages are bad. One cannot relate one control to another if one used percentages. Say that an audio card had two controls that adjust the gain of the audio one after the other. If I set to to 5% above base_volume and the second 5% below base_volume, would the output be base_volume??? the first 5% might be +5dB, and the second might be -4dB, one does not know.
Whereas, in dB, if one was set to -5dB, and the other set to +5dB, we would be sure that the accumulative output would have a gain of 0dB. Percentages are not nor real units at all, dB are.
Kind Regards
James
It is because alsamixer and amixer only need to display the "Master" volume control of one card at a time while pavucontrol and the new version of gnome volume control have to handle the "Master" volume control when PA switch sound cards
Different sound cards have different dB rangle for Playback and Capture.
If PA really use decibel range defined in those codec/DAC specification , it has to resize the slider of the Master Volume control or rescaling the sliders
To simpify the implementation of the slider , a new "PA dB scale" is used by shift those +12dB(base volume) to 0dB and insist that every sound card 's minimum_dB is -inf dB ,
This mean that all sound cards will now have same "PA dB range" , the volume slider does not need resize or rescaling any more. This is why they prefer to use percentage to make you believe their calculation of dB is correct