GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 409431
The Volume Applet does not allow to balance the sound (left-right)
Last modified: 2015-09-26 04:48:27 UTC
Please describe the problem: It would be very usefull to have a horizontal slider allowing to balance the sound from left to right... Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
And what about surround sound? ;) Should we have a point in a plan to "move" the sound from the origin?
Too difficult, setup for surround differs per sound chipset and ALSA does no effort whatsoever to make it easy or even plain standardized for apps. For some chips, there's separate controls for LFE, surround, center, side and front (e.g. intel's chipsets). For others, there's single controls with 8-16 channels (e.g. Augidy 2 NX). I don't know how to unfiy that without being hugely complex. That complex stuff should go into ALSA, not into a simple applet.
You are right, the applet shoud be simplistic. I was thinking about a more general mixer/advanced control. Maybe the bug summary could be changed from applet to mixer?
Nah, this is a different bug. Imagine that your left speaker is further away and thus you set it louder, then changing using the mixer makes the two equal again. They should - as possible - stay different given the rational difference between the two.
but currently you can not balance the sound at all on the applet. or is there any other frontend to the alsamixer alowing that ?
Balancing will never be there, but we can implement _maintainance_ of the existing balance. E.g. if the volume is 2 left and 3 right, and I increase by 50%, then it should go to 3 left and 4,5 right (or whatever appears to be the right way to maintain balance when I test it).
(In reply to comment #6) > Balancing will never be there, but we can implement _maintainance_ of the > existing balance. E.g. if the volume is 2 left and 3 right, and I increase by > 50%, then it should go to 3 left and 4,5 right (or whatever appears to be the > right way to maintain balance when I test it). > I even started to implement that last summer, but then I had some issues and drop my code.. sorry guys :) Basically, what I wanted to express was something similar to the vista "flat volume control" ie, have ability to express relations as a hierarchy of controls... that was very similar approach but more generic.
One of the issue of such _maintenance_ is the do'undo... from your example, Ronald, if the max of volume is 4, then we are changing the balance... We should take care to keep the factor between each track in order to maximize - unmaximize while saving the same panoramic/ratio configuration.
If this feature is implemented, it would be useful to also associate the balance control to horizontal scrolling, as described in Bug 416088 :-)
Though the applet doesn't have left/right balance the gnome-volume-control does these days...