Version: 1.3 (using KDE KDE 3.4.2) Installed from: Gentoo Packages OS: Linux Ever since amaroK 1.3_beta3 the option to select hardware volume mixer was removed. I'm asking the developers to bring back the option to select hardware volume mixing, i can not understand why it was removed in the first place.
Its not portable and only works on systems with OSS. Changing the hardware volume distorts sound sometimes. Its not the place of a media app to control the volume for all applications.
This is a major POLA violation (and a royal PITA) for anyone who has ever used xmms or winamp for any non-trivial period of time. If a popup tells me "Volume 50%", when no amarok-windows are open, I don't expect a second app to pipe in at full volume. That's precisely where I locate that aforementioned "UI astonishment". The astonishment was quite real and befell my neighbour as well (it was 0230 and I believed the volume to be set at 20% when I started mplayer...). The current behavior is (for _my_ personal preferences) nothing but broken. The feature works quite well on FreeBSD (I've tested 5 and 6 branches, on amd64 and i386, no linux emulation involved), as well as Linux (probably both architectures as well). That's quite portable in my book. After all, autoconf is supposed to detect the OS and it's not _that_ hard to create a switch for OS X. Please return the HW mixer. You may not like/need it, but I do. For me, it makes perfectly sense that _every_ volume slider sets the master volume. Besides, the software control lags *badly*. You obviously feel different about it, but this is highly subjective and the forums indicate I'm not entirely alone with my POV. For christ's sake, I'd be perfectly happy with a --with-hw-mixer option. I just don't want to patch amarok every time a must-have-update strolls along. It just took me a good hour to hack 1.3.1 and enginebase.cpp hasn't really progressed *that* far in between. Regards, Mario
I understand the reasons for having digital volume as well but I would appreciate to add mixer volume again and let the user select. Think about that digital volume control actually also decreases the output bitrate and some people like to use amarok as part of a high end playback system using external DAC.