17 | October | 2007 | Bryan Clark

3 out of 6 users prefer software mixing

In a slightly unscientific poll I attempted find out what users prefer, Hardware Sound Mixing or Software Sound Mixing.

Here is a GNOME user enjoying Hardware Sound Mixing, he looks happy and carefree.

Here is a GNOME user enjoying Software Sound Mixing, he also looks happy and carefree.

Thus the toss up, users seem to prefer each type just as much. One could say a lot of users (people who listen to music) don’t care where the sound gets mixed, in hardware or software, just that it does. Andrew got to the point that if you saw the pulse audio demo at the GNOME Summit you’d have been impressed, it allows us to be really reactive and dynamic with sound where we haven’t at all before; a huge step forward that’s available now.

I think Lennart’s mail while long and possibly abrasive to some people was pretty refreshing and right on at the same time. Right now we seem to be at a situation where audio sucks for most of our users all of the time because there is no mixing happing and no integration at the GNOME level. Things suck almost as much for people with hardware mixing because they have to go search the web for a solution to use their hardware mixer at the ALSA level. PA seems like it will at least bring GNOME forward for the majority of users who are likely having issues with sound, working to make hardware mixing work just as well seems like an parallel process, not a conflicting one.

And there’s no reason we couldn’t do much better than the vista sound mixer, we try. I’ve already gotten started and will need to post more mockups as I have them.

[Picture by Flickr user Fanboy30, used under a CC-BY-SA-NC license.]

Scanning for Feedback

Yesterday morning on the bus I was talking to Dan and asked if Network Manager could export a signal when it is actively searching for networks. As I mentioned in the previous post and many people pointed out in the comments that we need some feedback when the wireless card is actively looking for new networks. The situation where this happens most often is a laptop resuming from a suspend. When the laptop wakes Network Manager clears it’s AP list and starts scanning channels filling the fresh list. As it finds new networks and fills the AP list NM doesn’t tell the UI (nm-applet) that it is actively searching for new networks. Often the only feedback that the user receives is when NM finds a network it knows and begins to connect to it.

To improve this scenario we need some real user feedback during the scan process. I don’t think using an animated icon to show that NM is scanning is necessary, I think it might actually make things a little too busy.

Currently NM will display this “network disconnected” icon even while the wireless is actively scanning.