unity-design team mailing list archive

[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