GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 503686
Add mute menu entry
Last modified: 2014-01-26 00:19:24 UTC
Remove Volume Up/Down from popup menu. Currently they change the volume only by a tiny bit, so IMHO they are completely useless. Trying to turn the volume down when the phone rings requires at least couple of rightclick-move-leftclick sequences. I believe that a simple Mute option or a Volume submenu with 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% 100% presets would be much more useful. Other information:
They're pretty useless as menu entries, but they allow discovery of the keyboard shortcut to change the volume, which isn't negligible. Retitling to add a "mute" entry.
I agree, they're fine in Sound menu, where keyboard shortcuts are shown, but I was talking about right-click popup menu.
2007-12-17 Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> * data/totem.ui: Remove volume up/volume down from the popup menu, they're useless
Created attachment 101156 [details] [review] work in progress I'm a real beginner here, so be gentle with me :-) I've started a patch which (I hope!) is part way towards adding a "Mute" option to the sound menu and the right-click context menu. My changes (at least what I *think* I did): 1. Added action call-backs for the menu entry (idea based on Volume Up/Down, only changed to a Toggle). 2. Added "mute" to the options list. For some of the quoted strings I wasn't sure whether they were references to something, an internationalized string or whatever. I tried to pick something sane for everything I wasn't sure about. My main issue at the moment is that I don't know where to actually add the new menu entry into the UI - or did that magically happen via my other changes? Tips and pointers are welcomed!
Created attachment 101157 [details] [review] fixed copy-paste error I found a copy-paste error while reviewing my stuff and wanted to post a new patch to fix it.
Created attachment 101231 [details] [review] I think this is complete. I found the UI bits that I was missing before. - I've re-arranged the sound menu items into an order that I think are sane. Mute is the first item, followed by volume up, then down, then a separator, then language. Does that order seem reasonable? I kinda wanted mute to be at the end of the list with a separator before it but I couldn't come up with a good order for it. - I think I've added the volume-{up/down/mute} items to the right-click menu (that's totem-main-popup, right?). I'm curious about why the version of Totem I'm running (2.21.5) already has volume up/down here, but the code didn't. Anyway, it's there now. Can someone give me a review and let me know how it looks?
I don't think volume up/down should be in the popup menu, as they're not very useful. I removed them in comment 2. Rest of the patch looks good, although some people might have wanted mute/unmute, but I don't find it that useful to remember the volume before mute. It avoids problems like the speakers/headphones yelling when you take them out of mute.
I'll go ahead and remove those volume buttons from the context menu and send over another patch later tonight. As for the mute button, this issue reminds me a lot of my cell phone. I've got a flip phone with an outer display and three buttons. When I accidentally press the button on the right, it enters some dumb music library screen. That same button then becomes a back button, but I have to press it *3 TIMES* to get back to where I was before I pressed it. IMO, back mean "go back to where I just was", and unmute means "return to the volume I was at before". Also: - My TV recalls its volume when it's muted/unmuted; - My car stereo recalls its volume when it is powered on and off, and some actually have a mute botton which obviously isn't going to just lose the previous volume level; and - I can't think of any device which loses its volume after muting and I don't consider broken. FWIW, it'd also be easy to implement: don't save the gconf value when you mute, but recall it when you unmute. I could probably roll that into the patch if you like, or it could be another bug.
Fine by me, but what do you do when you press "volume up" or "volume down"?
Created attachment 102434 [details] [review] Remove volume up/down from context menu I've removed the two volume entries from right-click menu. Better? I've looked into the mute thing, it's not as trivial as I thought. It looks like the slider change event is somehow bound to that key, so I couldn't update it (or forget to) manually. I think implementing that will require a new gconf key to toggle mute, and a new API for the backends to mute. Probably not that hard, but it's definitely worth another bug if you want it done. Hell, maybe I'll tackle that next :-)
I added proper muting through totem_action_volume_toggle_mute(). Could you please update your patch?
Hi all! I wanted to let everyone know that I am indeed working to update my patch. I've got it written but want to test it before I post. Look out for it around Monday I think! (I'm excited about finally contributing something! :-D)
Created attachment 128842 [details] [review] add mute entries to the sound and main-context menus This patch adds a "Mute" entry to the bottom of the sound menu and near the bottom of the main right-click context menu. I've used M as the quick-access key (i.e. ctrl+s m activates mute), and this doesn't seem to conflict with anything on either of the menus mute was aded to. I've tested this and it seems to behave exactly as expected.
Just a minor correction: "Mute Audio" in the toggle_entries array should be "Mute audio" (sentence capitalization for tooltips, see http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/design-text-labels.html.en#layout-capitalization). By the way, where is toggle_entries used anyway? Grep showed nothing.
*** Bug 625419 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There's a system-wide sound menu already, and PulseAudio knows to "cork" audio/video applications when VoIP applications like Skype are used. I don't think that a Mute entry is useful at all.