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[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's on-topic because changing SoundEffect to the alert role (and fixing
bug 1418210, which should be fixed regardless) would fix this bug. The
volume hardware buttons would control the volume of the game sound
effects. But maybe there's a better solution. So let's step back a bit.

The goal of the audio roles is to minimize the number of times you feel
the need to adjust the volume per hour of use. We achieve that by
remembering your last preferred volume for different categories of
sound. It's a balancing act. The fewer categories we have, the more
likely it is that disparate things will share a category, so you'll more
often be changing the volume to suit one or the other. On the other
hand, the more categories we have, (a) the more you'll feel like the
phone is forgetting your choice when really it's just not sharing it
widely enough; (b) the more app developers will use the wrong one by
mistake; and (c) the more often sounds from multiple categories will be
playing at once, so you may get frustrated that the volume buttons
affect only one of them and not the other(s).

Then we give those categories a priority order, based mostly on what's
likely to be most important to you in that case when multiple categories
are playing at once. We put alarm first, because it's relatively
uncommon, but you can (if you want to) leave an alarm playing as long as
you like while fine-tuning its volume. We put alert last, because it's
likely to be short-lived, so (as demonstrated by this bug report) it's
not reasonable to expect you to adjust it during the brief period it's
playing.

Per spec, we currently have four categories, in order: alarm, phone (for call audio), multimedia, and alert. I think that the alert category should include both game sound effects (because they're often <1s long), and the ringtone (because you're likely to want it to be at the same volume). Drawbacks of this approach:
- Whenever a game is playing music as well, the volume buttons change the volume of the music but not the sound effects.
- Any others?

If the ringtone issue was a problem, we could solve it by putting
ringtone into a category all by itself, or moving it to the alarm
category: alarm/ringtone, phone call, multimedia, alert. Most/all apps
should stop playing audio altogether when the phone is ringing, so the
change in order should make little difference. But it would still have
the same drawback with apps that play both music and sound effects: the
volume buttons will change the former but not the latter.

It seems to me the only way to resolve that drawback would be to put sound effects and music in the same category, as they are now. But that would have a different drawback:
- If you're using an app that plays only sound effects (e.g. each time you send a message), while a different app is playing music, the sound effects will often be too loud, and there's nothing you can do about it short of going into Silent Mode.

I don't see any way to solve all those problems at once, so it's a
matter of choosing the least bad.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to pulseaudio in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1478506

Title:
  Apps change audio output role all the time

Status in Canonical System Image:
  Confirmed
Status in indicator-sound package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in pulseaudio package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  To reproduce, install the app "Maroon in trouble" from the app store
  and play it a little with having sound enabled. Press the volume down
  hardware button on the phone. It will temporarily decrease the volume.
  However, whenever a new item comes into the scene, it will be on 100%
  volume again.

  Setting the system volume to 0 should keep everything at 0.

  
  Please note that this app does *not* have any code to set the volume! Also this app is one of the upstream Qt QML example demo apps, so this is really how QML apps are supposed to work (in other words, it is not a badly implemented app, but really an issue in the system)

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