Re: Leaving the Desktop Market

On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 10:22:32AM +0100, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 1 Apr 2014, at 23:10, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting
> > my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is
> > a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set
> > up stuff once. It just works. If you want my example set-up, I can post it
> > somewhere or you can look in the archives for it as I have posted it in the
> > past.
> 
> It would be good to have this in the handbook (and to see what we can
> do to improve it).  FreeBSD audio typically works out of the box and
> it's great when it does[1], but it can be underdocumented black magic
> to make it work when it doesn't.  For example, I believe it's possible
> to tell pcm that when it receives a stereo stream it should redirect
> the left channel to the front and rear left, and the right channel to
> the front and rear right, but I haven't yet worked out how to do this
> - I'd have thought it was the kind of default that we'd want to have.
> 
> The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in
> USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing
> audio streams redirected there.  This should be possible with the
> existing sound stack, but there are some bits of plumbing missing.  We
> already do in-kernel mixing and resampling, which are the hard bits.
> Duplicating streams and redirecting them are trivial by comparison.
> 
> David
> 
> [1] Although I had a slightly embarrassing moment when I spent an hour
> hunting for docs to tell me how to configure my media centre box do
> 5.1 output and then decided to just try it and found it worked out of
> the box.

AFAIK we already can configure HDA's sound output and input in many ways
using sysctl(8).
What's still missing is a user-friendly way to configure sound. There
are some things that can be handled in one little program / script / TUI
/ GUI / CLI:

- Default sound unit (hw.snd.default_unit)
- Use the last inserted sound device as default? (hw.snd.default_auto) 
- PIN Routing (dev.hdaa.%d.config)
- Mixer settings

Putting it all together in something called sndcontrol should not be too
hard. It just takes someone(TM) to do it