kmix PulseAudio support

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Mark Kretschmann at 08/01/10 07:50 did gyre and gimble:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Alexis Ménard <menard at kde.org> wrote:
>> +1 KMix is horrible to use and way behind what's KDE 4 provides as a
>> user interface point of view. Unfortunately there is not that much
>> contributors behind right?
> 
> Sad, but true. When I open the "Configure Channels" dialog here with
> my SBLive of yore, I'm getting something like 30 sliders with obscure
> names, the meaning of which can only be guessed:
> 
> "3D Control - Switch"
> "Line 2 LiveDrive 2"
> "Headphone LFE 2"
> 
> 
> This is not really KMix's fault (the information comes from the
> driver, I guess), but we should probably try to filter this a bit,
> because this is just confusing. Noone can make sense of such names.

Indeed, this is one of the drawbacks of too much control. This is one of
the goals of PulseAudio in the first place. Hide all the complexity.
Sadly due to the vast variation across drivers this is hard, but the PA
devs have been pushing the ALSA folk down a standardistation route and
things are generally improving in this regard meaning and we can now
more or less rely on "Master" always working which we couldn't not all
that long ago.

So filtering is good, but it's not an easy process.

(It should be rather obvious from my background but I'm clearly more in
favour of getting more help to iron out the bugs in a PA based system
and take advantage of the simplification of controls that offers, but I
appreciate that there will likely always be people who prefer not to go
down that route)

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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