[arch-general] OT: [arch-dev-public] polkit package upgrade patch

[Tom Gundersen]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 12:31 AM, Fons Adriaensen <fons at linuxaudio.org> wrote:
> First, PA has no visibility on whatever internal volume control
> an app provides. It just doesn't know about it. All it gets is
> the output from the app.

This is not correct. If the app has proper PA support (such as all KDE
apps, and probably all gnome apps), then PA does the app specific
mixing, not the app itself. Moreover, if only one app is playing sound
then PA does no mixing at all, but passes it all directly to ALSA (and
sets ALSA's controls of course).

> Second, PA has no way to know how to correctly use the soundcard
> controls, or even to know what exactly they control and how they
> do it. On some cards the 'master' is digital scaling before the
> D/A converter. On some others it controls an analog gain stage
> after the converter. The correct way to use those is completely
> different.

If I understand correctly ALSA provides lots of meta-information about
the controllers to PA. Before PA this meta information was ignored,
and it is due to bugs in that that PA had a bad reputation in the
beginning.

PA has heuristics to try to do the best it can with the information
provided to it. Are you saying that an unqualified user is likely to
get a better result than these heuristics? It seems that what you are
saying should mean that ALAS is clearly not good enough, and that we
need something more, such as PA to deal with getting the mixing right,
as it is too hard for users.

-t