[Sugar-devel] Sound levels and pulseaudio fallout

[Martin Langhoff]

(written as part of the brussels test session)

One thing consistent across the machines we're testing with Soas is
that many (most?) of them get very low sound levels. This is an issue
with Fedora and Pulseaudio.

The fedora devel list is aflame with discussion about this, and it
appears that -- beyond the flaming -- the problem is real, and not
easy to solve (meaning it won't be solved in F11). There's an
excellent article on the topic @ http://lwn.net/Articles/330684/

It looks like Fedora (for this release) will recommend people to use
alsamixer (and a revived oldstyle gnome-mixer) as a workaround. I'm
not sure if there's a scripted way to get the "other" channels pumped
up to their max levels properly -- and if you do it blindly, it seems
that you might overshoot the mark and saturate.

Thought I'd flag it as it's quite likely to hit many Soas users. (On
known hw such as the XO it's easier to rig it).

cheers,



m
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