Created attachment 149870 [details] Screenshot of volume control element I am using KDE Plasma on a laptop with multiple audio devices attached: - Analog headphones with built-in microphone, connected through a headphone jack. - Jabra speak, connected through USB - Internal laptop speakers + microphone. For some reason these appear as "HDMI1". - (in the screenshot you also see HDMI2, I have no idea what this is) From the tray area in the panel I can open the audio switcher + volume control thingie (widget? applet? no idea). This has some usability problems: - It is hard to distinguish or visually separate speakers from microphones: - The icon that could distinguish microphone from speaker is way too small. - There is no visual separation between microphones section and speakers section. - It is also difficult to distinguish any devices from each other: - Device labels are often confusing or misleading or contain details that don't help to distinguish them. E.g. all of them are "Tiger-Lake" something, this tells me nothing and it does not help to distinguish them. And for some reason my laptop speaker is called "HDMI" something. - The possible states are unclear: - Switcher controls look like radio buttons (round), which suggests only one can be active at a time, but... - Because mics and speakers are visually not separate, one should think this is one group of radios - but it is not, obviously one can select a speaker and a microphone simultaneously. - To make it worse, I can also sometimes select more than one speaker. But this is not consistent, e.g. activating speaker A might deactivate speaker B, but not vice versa. - Overall layout and style: - Elements are too big, while the box itself has a constrained width, so seeing all of them requires scrolling. - Space is wasted without increasing UX. There are also real bugs, e.g. sometimes I see speaker A active in the controls, but sound is coming from speaker B. I need to switch back and forth to fix it.
1. I'm not sure if it has changed recently or not but there is a horizontal line between sinks and sources (at least for my chosen Plasma theme) but perhaps the UI team could take hint that the separation is not distinct enough. 2. Device names, I think, come from pulseaudio or pipewire-pulse and maybe should be addressed there (though perhaps plasma-pa could do better?). On pipewire-pulse side there's also been changes to that in the past months, so maybe that issue will be fixed for Ubuntu in 22.10? 3. Being able to select multiple sinks or sources as the single default is not a feature, it's a bug. ;) I would suspect plasma-pa but it seems to clear for me when I restart pipewire-pulse, so maybe the PulseAudio daemon or libpulse.so is involved in it? 4. For the plasma-pa default sink vs. where the sound is routed to mismatch please check `pactl info | grep Sink` to see if there's really a difference between what the PulseAudio daemon thinks is the default and what plasma-pa reports. If the two agree, then it's most likely something else e.g. per-stream sink/source override or the client picking its own sink/source (not sure but probably possible?).
> 1. I'm not sure if it has changed recently or not but there is a horizontal line between sinks and sources (at least for my chosen Plasma theme) but perhaps the UI team could take hint that the separation is not distinct enough. I don't know if the separating line was there when I opened this request, but it is still too subtle I would say. Especially when you scroll into a position where the line is not visible. ----- Your other points are mostly technical, I can't say much about them atm.
Created attachment 171657 [details] Screenshot of multiple radio buttons active at the same time
I think this issue deserves a much higher priority - even to this day it's still possible that multiple sinks are selected at the same time, indicating that these aren't true radio buttons. What's more, sometimes audio is coming from an unselected sink. There definitely is at least one significant bug here.
Setting to confirmed since these issues are still present on X11 and Wayland Operating System: Solus 4.5 KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.4.0 Qt Version: 6.7.2 Kernel Version: 6.9.8-294.current (64-bit)
Ultimately plasma-pa is just the GUI. The actual audio routing is being done by either the legacy PulseAudio or the newer PipeWire stack. The UI no doubt should be improved but the issues you're seeing are in the audio daemons. I would suspect that it's an issue with old version of WirePlumber 0.4 or early 0.5 series and upgrading to a current version such as WirePlumber 0.6.5 will if not fix then at least greatly reduce these problems. I'm no longer involved with PW, so my recollection of how to debug this is gone but it might be worth reporting this upstream to WirePlumber, if you're using that and a current 0.6.x release does not help. In principle the issue could happen with PA, too, so do check which one you're using. ;)
I guess you're the expert here as I've never dealt with either audio or UI programming, but isn't it definitely a UI bug if a radio button menu can have several radio buttons activated? I thought that's forbidden by definition. I'm not saying there aren't *also* a wirepluber or pulseaudio bugs involved though :) I'm using PulseAudio by the way, KDE Neon with Plasma 6.1 and an ubuntu 22.04 base.
Created attachment 173343 [details] Volume slider is not at 0, but tray bar icon shows no audio output icon There's another issue (I added another screenshot). One thing that can also happen is that the volume slider is not at 0, but the audio icon in the task bar shows a crossed out speaker, indicating that sound is disabled.
Please file individual bugs per issue. It's impossible to action a pile of things in a reasonable manner :(