Re: [Audacity-quality] Audacity output controls hardware WAS Re: Windows 7 testing.

[Al D. <bus...@gm...>]

On Friday 15 January 2010 05:01:26 David Bailes wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Gale Andrews 
<ga...@au...> wrote:
> > | From David Bailes <drb...@go...>
> >>
> >> Is the noise/signal ratio a real issue in practice? It would be
> >> far preferable for users of screen readers if the output slider
> >> changed the audacity application volume, and so didn't affect
> >> the volume of the screen reader as well. I don't know of any
> >> programs running on windows 7 which change the system volume.
> >
> > Probably an established feature request rather than an "issue"
> > where we might tweak something, and certainly not a bug.
> 
> Just to point out that the audacity output slider didn't change the
> system volume prior to 1.3.10. So it's a request to return to prior
> functionality, rather than a feature request.
> 

I think the Audacity output slider controlled system volume pre-Vista 
(there were no app-specific volume controls before that). Vista 
introduced a new audio API that PortMixer didn't support, so 
Audacity's slider didn't even control the app-specific volume setting 
-- it used the fallback of putting a gain on the signal within 
Audacity. 1.3.10 added PortMixer support for the new API, and started 
behaving like it did on previous Windows versions.

I think that Audacity should control app-specific volume on systems 
that support it because that's what users expect of programs on those 
platforms (this includes Linux with PulseAudio, if we ever get real 
PulseAudio support). Other people disagree and don't want any software 
gain applied to the signal because it affects the signal-noise ratio.

Maybe we should give people a choice. I'm thinking something in 
Preferences so there's a bit of space to explain the choice. If the 
user chooses "system hardware volume" the slider should never control 
a software gain on any platform (it becomes disabled if no hardware 
control is available), and if the user chooses "application volume" 
the slider would try to control the application volume and fall back 
to an internal gain if that's not available.

 - Al

> David.
> 
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