Patch for KMix

[Christian Esken]

On Sunday 30 November 2003 13:47, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Sunday 30 November 2003 7:27, Christian Esken wrote:
> > On Saturday 29 November 2003 23:14, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> >
> > And if the option is in the menubar it would get clearer?
>
> No, it would be harder to find, which would be a good thing.  ;-)  Oh, and
> because that's where it would be under almost any other circumstances...

Not under all cictumstances. KDE's print dialog has an "Expand" button that 
works the same. Probably KMix is dialog-like as soon as I hide its menu with 
CTRL-m. ;)


> > Disabling is absolutely out-of-question, as important soundcard-dependent
> > switches are available there, like input selection (Optical vs Coax
> > SPDIF). The "Advanced" options are already hidden by default.
>
> Then in the future this should have a popup when you enable it explaining
> what's going on.

The first thing that is going to happen is to reduce the number of controls 
and to group them better - there are luckily some "well-known" control names 
and  stuff like ALSA enumerations will help too.
If there are questions open after the planned changes there should be a 
comment/popup/whatever.

But please remember KMix from previous KDE versions: All those "Advanced" 
options were right before your very eye ... directly shown. So this is a 
big step forward. Don't be afraid: All will be well with KDE3.2.1  :-)



> > And it is a driver matter, whether these options are understandable or
> > not. For example the "nForce2" driver has options like "Swap Surround",
> > "Duplicate Front", "Exchange Center/LFE". You can easily understand those
> > by their name (or by clicking them and hearing the difference).
>
> Well, but uhm, that's great if they get lucky -- and happen to speak
> English. For everyone else there a checkbox right up front to turn on large
> group of options that don't make any sense.

So where is the "limit". Can we expect users to understand "LFE", "DAC", 
"Capture", "IGain" or "Line" (in KMix since 1996)? Can we expect them to 
understand "POP Filters",  "Set Encoding", "Message->Bounce" (from KMail's 
main menu)?


The extra problem is, that Mixers are highly hardware bound application and 
the texts are dynamically generated by the driver. As soundcard manufactures 
don't ship 40-language ALSA drivers, we have to live with English.
For now it is a rethorical question only. What are the other possibilities?

1) Ship no mixer with ALSA support
2) wait for ALSA1.1 or 1.2 or 2.0 or whatsoever
3) wait for an i10n enabled ALSA div(or alsa-lib)
4) Ship with ALSA support but don't show the options and thus render several 
soundcards useless.

All 4 possibilities mean that there would be no usable KDE soundcard mixer for 
ALSA users. I am sure we do not want this. There are a lot of ideas on my desk 
to make KMix's ALSA support more user friendly, just give me some time.

  Chris

PS: Packagers can decide to compile KMix with OSS support only, if they think 
users will be confused (there's nothing "Advanced" in OSS).