ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Michi Henning <michi.henning@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is not a totally trivial problem. Just think of calendar alerts which should probably have their own volume level that is *not* under application control, but user control. Moreover, they should probably always play over the speaker, unless the phone is silenced.

I wrote an article that touches on some of these topics a few years ago:

http://www.triodia.com/staff/michi/blog/Apple.pdf

But, in general, I tend to agree. Fewer roles is probably better, in the interest of user sanity.

Cheers,

Michi.


On 21 Sep 2015, at 18:30 , Michael Zanetti <michael.zanetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I'd like to discuss a topic which, as a daily user of the phone drives
> me a bit bad and makes me lose countless phone calls: Volume controls.
> 
> If you go through launchpad bugs, you'll find lots of bugs related to
> volume control [1][2][3][4]. Let me summarize it up here:
> 
> The biggest issue is that the volume buttons are completely
> unpredictable. They control a different volume level each time you touch
> them. For instance, play some game with a background music, press the
> volume buttons. It will adjust the game's sound level (maybe, with a bit
> of luck). Then start the game "Dinosaur" from the store and try again,
> you'll notice that while playing this game the volume buttons don't
> affect the sound made by the game any more but instead they'll leave the
> game at 100% volume, while silencing your phone call ringtones. This is
> the thing that makes me lose phone calls all the time. I play some game
> with the phone, and when I'm done my ringtones are silenced without me
> even knowing.
> Another issue is that currently there's not really way to figure what
> volume level your device is set to. The slider in the indicator is quite
> meaningless, given it will fool you by displaying some value, but next
> time a sound is produced it will jump to some different value before
> playing the sound. This also creates the issue that there's no way to
> control your sound level *before* you start a game, means you can't
> really start a game on Ubuntu Touch in a place where you can't make
> noise, because you have no chance to set the volume before it starts
> playing.
> 
> I've spent some time to figure where the issue is coming from and what a
> solution could be. The main reason where this issue is coming from is
> that we have a number of different audio roles that applications are
> using. The volume buttons, as well as the slider in the indicators try
> to be clever in knowing which role they should address whenever you
> touch them. This, however, seems to reliably fail in 99% of the cases
> you want to use it.
> 
> So here's my proposal:
> 
> * Let's drop all the audio roles we have except for ringtone (alert) and
> multimedia. We don't need more of them, it'll make things unnecessarily
> complex.
> 
> * Make the hardware buttons always control the multimedia volume, that
> is, game sounds, music player etc but don't ever touch ringtone volume
> with them.
> 
> * Make the volume slider in the indicator always control the multimedia
> volume, never touch the ringtone volume.
> 
> * Apps should always use the multimedia role, regardless of what they do
> (unless thy deal with actual calls or incoming messages).
> 
> * Add a second "slider" to the indicators that controls ringtone volume.
> That slider could be a bit special tho, i.e. that it works more like a
> profile selector. 0 is "vibrate only", 1 is "beep" and all the greater
> values adjust volume of the ringtones.
> 
> One thing I've not mentioned here yet are alarms. Alarms, again
> could/should have their own role. But one never controls that role with
> either the buttons or a slider. Instead, each alarm has his own volume
> value assigned when the alarm is created, and an alarm is always played
> at the volume its config says (except maybe only vibrate when the phone
> profile is set to vibrate only - but those are small details we could
> work out on the road).
> 
> IMO this behaviour would make the volume way more predictable,
> especially since one needs to use a slider in the indicators to change
> the ringtone volume but at the same time giving the user visual feedback
> on what the current volume is.
> 
> What do you think? If you're working on anything related to this, please
> help to get this issue fixed and improve the Ubuntu Phone experience.
> 
> Br,
> Michael
> 
> 
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1484463
> [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1478506
> [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-sound/+bug/1478075
> [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity8/+bug/1291458
> 
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