Re: [Ayatana] Two suggested designs for the Sound Indicator

[Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Sense:

As far as I can see, in your mail you only mention using PulseAudio's functionality as the main justification for your design, which is a purely technical reason. We should rather start by thinking about use cases: what are people supposed to do with this functionality?

My problem with your design is that, as far as I can tell, the large majority of people won't want to play more than one sound source at the same time. You are watching a video, or playing some background musing, or chatting with someone, but doing two or more of these at the same time is very rare, because they clearly interfere with each other.

So, for example, if you're playing background music and want to watch that video you just got from your pal over IM, you'll probably pause the music. And if someone calls you over Skype when you're watching the video, you'll pause it before taking the call. Given that this is the case, a single volume slider should suffice. The only "normal" situation I can think about where it makes sense to have sound mixed or superimposed is when notification sounds ("you have new mail") play on top of other sources. For this case, the volume of notifications should be made so that they're audible over the sound that is currently playing, which is something that probably can be achieved automatically anyway.

This said, there are some people who will want to mix sound from several sources, such as DJs and other performance artists or people working on sound production. I doubt, however, that they will want to use an indicator menu as their UI, and will have to be provided with a specialized solution anyway.

Do people see other use cases I'm missing?

Cheers,

Martín