On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 04:45:42PM -0600, David Young wrote:
> Every volume control is not a slider.  Oftentimes the volume control is
> a a pair of buttons, volume up/down.

Never seen such an application, but I guess they exist.

> If a user taps a volume up/down
> button, he wants for the volume to change instantaneously---it's
> misleading and annoying to the user if he has to tap the volume control
> 4-5 times before any change is audible.

Step of 1/16 of full scale would be audible.  What if the hardware allows
for 256 steps or even more?  Is one step audible then?

> It seems to me that a kernel
> volume API that both scales and provides ++volume, --volume is necessarily
> more complicated than one that lets you adjust the volume between
> [0, hwmax].

I don't need to know the size of a hard disk to be able to write a file to
it.  Why doesn't the audio driver hide volume control details?

> I think we can afford the overhead for audio applications that want to
> scale to compute (app_volume * hwmax) / APP_VOLUME_MAX, don't you?

Give xmmix a try and you'll know why I dislike the way NetBSD works at the
moment.  Besides the fact that I stills strongly believe it is the very
purpose of the audio drivers to make the various audio hardware look the
same to the application programs.  I still don't know how other unix clones
work, but I'm 99% certain they do NOT work the way NetBSD does.

  -jm