Sound indicator should only indicate ringtone volume

[Michał Sawicz]

On the phone, the volume indicator follows the current active stream volume (music, alarm etc.) to show and control via slider and/or volume buttons.

The indicator icon and slider should only ever follow the ringtone volume. I'm not sure whether volume buttons should work for alarms.

This is somewhat related to bug #1291458.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.04
Package: indicator-sound 12.10.2+15.04.20150508-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 3.4.67 armv7l
ActionStates: ({'mediaplayer-app.desktop.greeter': (true, signature '', [<{'running': <false>, 'state': <'Paused'>}>]), 'mute': (true, '', [<false>]), 'phone-settings': (true, '', []), 'mic-volume': (true, '', [<1.0>]), 'scroll': (true, 'i', []), 'high-volume': (true, '', [<false>]), 'play-playlist.mediaplayer-app.desktop': (true, 's', []), 'desktop-settings': (true, '', []), 'mediaplayer-app.desktop': (true, '', [<{'running': <false>, 'state': <'Paused'>}>]), 'play.mediaplayer-app.desktop': (true, '', [<'Paused'>]), 'volume': (true, 'i', [<0.7414398193359375>]), 'next.mediaplayer-app.desktop': (true, '', []), 'indicator-shown': (true, '', [<false>]), 'root': (true, '', [<{'title': <'Dźwięk'>, 'accessible-desc': <'Głośność (74%)'>, 'icon': <('themed', <['audio-volume-high-panel', 'audio-volume-high', 'audio-volume', 'audio']>)>, 'visible': <true>}>]), 'silent-mode': (true, '', [<false>]), 'previous.mediaplayer-app.desktop': (true, '', [])},)
ApportVersion: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.1
Architecture: armhf
Date: Fri Jul 24 18:07:15 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-07-23 (1 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.04 - armhf (20150723-020304)
SourcePackage: indicator-sound
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

I think there should be two sliders in the indicator. One for ringtone volume, one for all multimedia sound.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Andrea Bernabei (faenil)]

+1 to that, something tells me your opinion is biased by Harmattan :D

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Totally, as I wrote in the other bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity8/+bug/1291458/comments/2 MeeGo had this solved really well.

Just one thing I'm not sure how it worked there - app volume. What Michael's proposing is that we only really have 'ringtone' + 'other' volumes (I'd add 'alarms' to that, changed in the clock app) - I'm just not 100% sure we should put music, video and general app sounds in the same bag, but that's what the design exercise should define I think.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

Bug #1396986 is described in the opposite sense but is really the same issue. As I posted there the design calls for the heading on the slider to change based on mode. I believe in settings we should show the current setting for all four independent modes - alarm, alert, multimedia and phone, while the indicator panel can show the current mode as described in the spec.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

There doesn't seem to be a problem described at all here, and the proposal is perplexing.

Why should the indicator slider change only the ringtone volume? That would mean if you were playing music, the indicator slider would not change the volume of the music, which would be ... surprising. And it would mean the indicator slider and the volume buttons controlled different things, which would also be surprising. Unless you think the volume buttons should do the same, and control only the ringtone -- but in that case there would be no way at all of changing music that was playing in the background, which would be even worse.

Multiple sliders in the indicator is bug 1437598.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Because when playing music, you can't change ringtone volume (and they *are*, even today, different), they are two very separate things IMO.

As I described, the volume slider as we have it today, should not really be a volume slider at all, but rather a profile-change-slider, including "silent", "quiet" and a handful of volumes for the ringtone. The hardware buttons should totally follow the currently active sound, falling back to ringtone volume if nothing's playing.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Android and iOS combined have about 96% market share, and neither of them work the way you describe. That doesn't necessarily mean either of them have the ideal design. But it does mean you have to give a lot more explanation before you use the word "should" so much.

It's true that with the current UI you can't change the ringtone volume while media is playing. But there's still no explanation here of why that would actually be a problem, or why it follows that the best possible solution to the problem would be for the sound indicator to only indicate ringtone volume. Did you consider any other possible solutions?

[Stuart Langridge (sil)]

"It's true that with the current UI you can't change the ringtone volume while media is playing. But there's still no explanation here of why that would actually be a problem"

An additional piece of information which may weigh into this discussion (I propose no solutions here) is that of apps and games which play sounds but do not play constant music. This may be because they are capable of playing background music but the user has switched it off, or that the app is not a game but uses sounds for various events. In such a situation, it is often very difficult to decrease the sound volume of the game. If the current foreground app is, for example, a game which plays sounds for events but does not have background music, then it's very unclear what using the hardware volume keys is *expected* to do in this situation. Application sounds obey the media volume setting, not the ringer volume setting (and I assume for this discussion that they will continue to do so, although see below). If the hardware volume keys are used when such a game is the current app, should they adjust the media volume? The phone is not currently playing any media, and there is no obvious direct feedback to be heard when the media volume adjusts (unlike, for example, the music app, where a media volume change is immediately apparent). But if the hardware volume keys adjust the ringer volume when there is no media *playing*, then it becomes effectively impossible to decrease the volume of the game's event sounds. Android and iOS both suffer from this issue, and it is I think at least partially because there are at least two independent volume settings (media and ringer) but they are presented as one context-dependent setting. Maybe separating out the two settings and making them independently adjustable would help alleviate this confusion (at the cost of additional complexity)?

[Stuart Langridge (sil)]

(Additional: perhaps app event sounds should obey the ringer volume, not the media volume? This is unlikely to be a good approach and carries with it its own confusion; it becomes impossible to silence a game without also silencing the ringer, which is not good.)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Per spec, if an app/game is playing sounds but not music, that is the "alert" output role. As long as an alarm is not sounding, a phone call is not in progress, and you're not playing music some other way, all volume controls should adjust the volume of that app's sounds. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#primary-output>

In other words, if apps "obey the media volume setting" for things that aren't music/video, that's probably a bug.

I just realized that when I added output roles to the spec, I updated the design for the System Settings slider and the volume buttons, but I neglected to update the design for the indicator slider to match. Spec updated. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound?action=diff&rev2=148&rev1=147> But that doesn't seem to be related to this bug report, and I still have no reason to think that this bug report is valid.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The bug where apps are using an output role that the volume controls usually don't show is bug 1478506.