Does one have to be a sound engineer?

[Timothy Murphy-2]

I installed Fedora-9 (from the KDE Live CD)
on a big new disk on my laptop (ThinkPad T43) yesterday,
and found that sound was not working.
I noticed on left-clicking on the sound icon in the panel
that the sound mixer was muted,
and the sound was set at minimal level as well.
Why?
Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working
at a reasonably high level when one logs on?

Anyway, after unmuting the sound and increasing the level
I found there was still no sound.

Left-clicking on the sound icon, and then left clicking on the word "Mixer"
in the small window that appeared brought up a KMix window.
I noticed that the "Front" slider was set at the minimal level in this,
and pushing it up started sound working.

What exactly does "Front" mean?

Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication.
As far as I can see, all I can do under Windows
is make the sound stronger or weaker.
I must say that is all I want.

Am I alone in feeling there is too much expertise,
and not enough common sense, in the Linux sound community?



--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Tim-163]

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 16:20 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> What exactly does "Front" mean?

If you have multi-channel sound, then that's either the front-centre
channel volume, or an overall front speakers volume.  But I highly doubt
it'd be the second.

  left       centre       right
  front      front        front

              you

  left                    right
  rear                    rear

  and, somewhere, a sub-woofer


> Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication.

Hmmph, try setting up multichannel audio on XP, and you'll find out it
can be a complete mess.

In either case, Windows or Linux, some multi-channel cards can be
operated in different modes (multi-channel, or just two-channel), and
that'll affect which volume control does what if they re-arrange the
order of the channels.  It also affects what connectors do what, on many
there's not enough sockets for everything.  So you lose microphone and
line inputs to become rear channel outputs, etc.

Computer audio hardware is a crock.  Even the manufacturers make a mess
of it when supplying their own software to run their hardware.  It's no
wonder that outsiders don't get it right, either.

--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.



--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[max bianco]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard@...> wrote:

>
> I installed Fedora-9 (from the KDE Live CD)
> on a big new disk on my laptop (ThinkPad T43) yesterday,
> and found that sound was not working.
> I noticed on left-clicking on the sound icon in the panel
> that the sound mixer was muted,
> and the sound was set at minimal level as well.
> Why?
> Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working
> at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
>

I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums.
 Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.

> Anyway, after unmuting the sound and increasing the level
> I found there was still no sound.

I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well.
Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something like that)

>
> Left-clicking on the sound icon, and then left clicking on the word "Mixer"
> in the small window that appeared brought up a KMix window.
> I noticed that the "Front" slider was set at the minimal level in this,
> and pushing it up started sound working.
>
> What exactly does "Front" mean?
>
> Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication.
> As far as I can see, all I can do under Windows
> is make the sound stronger or weaker.
> I must say that is all I want.
>
> Am I alone in feeling there is too much expertise,
> and not enough common sense, in the Linux sound community?
>
>
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list@...
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>

--
If opinions were really like assholes we'd each have just one

--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Timothy Murphy-2]

max bianco wrote:

>> Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working
>> at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
>
> I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums.
>  Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.

Windows doesn't seem to worry about that.
As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker -
I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.

> I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well.
> Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something like that)

I'm using KDE, and don't see any setting like this in the main menu.
The only sound application there is KMix,
which does not seem to offer anything along those lines.

The only other application that I can see to control sound
is System Settings=>Sound
and I don't see anything similar there either.

(Incidentally, I would have thought the default was always ALSA -
what else could it be?)



--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Fri, 7/4/08, Timothy Murphy <gayleard@...> wrote:

> From: Timothy Murphy <gayleard@...>
> Subject: Re: Does one have to be a sound engineer?
> To: fedora-list@...
> Date: Friday, July 4, 2008, 10:54 AM
> max bianco wrote:
>
> >> Surely the rational setup would be to have sound
> working
> >> at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
> >
> > I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or
> your ear drums.
> >  Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.
>
> Windows doesn't seem to worry about that.
> As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker -
> I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.
>
> > I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well.
> > Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something
> like that)
>
> I'm using KDE, and don't see any setting like this
> in the main menu.
> The only sound application there is KMix,
> which does not seem to offer anything along those lines.
>
> The only other application that I can see to control sound
> is System Settings=>Sound
> and I don't see anything similar there either.
>
> (Incidentally, I would have thought the default was always
> ALSA -
> what else could it be?)

It was arts for KDE and esound for Gnome prior to PulseAudio.  Now it is PulseAudio.  
>
>
>
> --


     

--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

[Tim-163]

max bianco:
>> I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums.
>> Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.

Timothy Murphy:
> Windows doesn't seem to worry about that.
> As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker -
> I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.

Try using powered speakers with no volume control on them (some JBL
speakers that came with a Compaq monitor, long ago), they depend on your
mixer to completely control levels.  They go damn loud when driven with
full audio levels.

A proper use of a volume control would be that a high level (on your
control position) is relative to very loud audio.  That's not a good
default.

--
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, all using Gnome
 in case that's important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.

--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@...
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list