GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 603900
Missing capability to monitor audio input at output
Last modified: 2013-04-18 13:43:43 UTC
The new gnome-volume-control does not offer the possibility to the user to optionally hear the signal that is connected to the input of the audio device. I think this is clearly a desktop audio need. Here some of the cases when this is necessary. User story 1: User Peter uses his computer as a media centre, he inputs his gaming console into his computer. The video gets displayed fine, but he does not hear the audio from the device that he plugs into his line-in jack. He goes to gnome-volume-control and finds a fader that he pulls up to hear the sound from the console. User story 2: User Tony has a headset with massive headphones that block out sound effectively. When he speaks with grandma via VoIP, hearing his own voice through the phones feels totally awkward to him. He goes to gnome-volume-control to mix his own voice into master signal so he hears himself properly. User story3: User Hanna wants to sing karaoke along with her collection of subtitled songs that he plays back in her favourite music player software. To blend in with the song she naturally has to amplify his voice mixed with the player output. She goes to gnome-volume-control and turns up the input monitoring just as much that it does not give feedback. Right now, to achieve the above, the user has to run alsamixer in a terminal and unmute/level the input channel in the playback page via the unfamiliar Curses interface and the keyboard. In terms of good defaults it would make sense to enable input monitoring for line-in by default. The default for mic monitoring should rather be muted to prevent possible feedback (depending on the user's setup). However, this still has to be manually adjustable, as most notebooks only come with a mic input that is used as line-in then as well. I think it would be enough if only the currently selected input channel would be monitorable as this probably covers most desktop audio user's needs. I am going to link the corresponding Ubuntu Launchpad bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-media/+bug/486164) to this here. Regards, Alex
As mentioned in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=505676 You could write a front-end for the "module-loopback" functionality of gnome-media fairly easily (though I won't be the one working on it).
Mass move to gnome-control-center.
Mass reassign, sorry for the noise.
This could be, and should be implemented as a separate application/utility.