db volume scaling

[Jud Craft]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Pavel Shved<pavel.shved at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 10 June 2009 23:45:18 Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>> ...WTF are you going on about, Pavel?
>
> About please, please, please please just once answer to a complex-feature-
> contributor `would be nice, submit patch with your feature as a non-default
> option'
> instead of `out target audience is too dumb for that, go to hell'.
>

That's not his response.  He actually encouraged the patch for
volume-scaling, but not for the UI change.  And his reason for
disliking the UI change was not "users are dumb."

It's more frankly, "need a better justification than 'I don't like
percentages'."  We're talking about a text caption on a meter, and
what type of caption (a unit of % or a dB) has no effect on the real
end-use-case of it (users just moving the meter up and down to find a
value they like).

If they implement the scaling patch (so Tim gets the dB scaling he
wants) but leaves the UI with % marks for a normal user, everyone will
be just fine, since those who understand logarithmic scales will be
able to do the math for a %-dB conversion on the scale Tim has
suggested.  Especially since Tim has already outlined how he did it.

Or, sure, they could put the dB marks on the volume meter, that'd be
okay too.  But as before -- would it really matter?  There is no
compelling necessity to formally present the usage of a unit that
non-sound-processing-aware users aren't paying attention to, and
power-users would already know is there (assuming this is the scaling
algorithm they adopt).