2010/5/4 Alex Launi
<alex.launi@xxxxxxxxx>
These were certainly helpful. I think you've nailed a lot of the sound related use cases.
I think the take home message of this is that there are two distinct types of sound streams. I'm going to use the analogy we've been using in notifications- Synchronous and Asynchronous.
- Synchronous streams are those that are user initiated. Banshee, Empathy Voice/Video chat, Youtube videos, etc. Streams that come from explicitly user initiated actions.
- Asynchronous streams are those that are not user initiated, and are triggered by environment events. Incoming IM sounds, alert noises.
Asynchronous streams should be handled by the system, but we should design a means of allowing users to adjust the volume of synchronous streams.
Maybe this is outside the scope of the discussion, but with respect to synchronous streams, I can think of many times where I am browsing websites and opening new tabs as I'm e.g. reading an article when all of a sudden something, somewhere, starts playing audio. I didn't try to initiate any audio stream, but now there is, say, an embedded video playing on some tab somewhere, and I can't find it. I'm not sure what my point is, but it seems like there are two kinds of "synchronous" streams -- those the user expected to happen, and those that the user didn't. The latter case almost blends in the definition of asynchronous streams.
-Scott
--