Comment 9 for bug 655351

I'm obviously confused about the jack colors ):

However, examining general sound equipment usage:

Line-out *shouldn't be amplified*. Speaker-out should. Line-out should be
used by people who have dedicated amplifiers (ie, me: I should be using it,
but I don't -- I haven't stumbled across not having a line-out on my current
hardware because I like having the volume control "just work". I do,
however, remember jacking into the wrong port on a prior card (I think it
was an SB) and getting a very low volume with no amp, finding out it was
line-out and switching to speaker-out). Speaker-out should be used for
simple speakers which require amplification or lazy people like me who like
using software volume controls.

So it wouldn't surprise me, since I've obviously gotten the colors wrong (or
misread things) that most audio cards don't have a real line-out -- they
just have a speaker-out.

So, whilst I'm certainly not picking a fight with you (since this is
apparently an upstream decision), I can still come back to my original
points:
1) headphones muting the speakers used to work pre-9.04 (so we have an
established user expectation even under Ubuntu)
2) headphones mute the built-in speakers of my laptop (windows and ubuntu)
-- why the inconsistent behaviour for a desktop? Just because the speakers
in the laptop are bolted into the frame of the machine? What an arbitrary
3) Windows gets it right: plugging in headphones mutes external speakers --
it's convenient. Though I think you can disable that feature if you want.
I'm told by a person at work that his Mac does the same.
4) It seems to be the expectation of the user -- note the number of bug
reports against this design choice.

Again, I'm really not fighting with you on this -- picking a fight with you
would be kinda pointless here (:
However, I would like to ask you for some help: where would I lodge this as
a request upstream? ALSA devs? It's easy to report an ubuntu bug/request
with apport -- not so easy to know what to do if the problem isn't
Ubuntu-specific. I don't mind taking this further -- there seems to be
enough general confusion over the matter that there might actually be some
consideration put into my request (or am I just being naive and optimistic?)

Thanks
-d

On 7 October 2010 11:07, David Henningsson <email address hidden>wrote:

> Um, light blue is line-in, not line-out.
> I'm not sure if I have ever seen a "speaker out" and if so, I don't
> remember what color it had.
>
> --
> [ALC888 - HDA ATI SB] Headphones don't mute master sound
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/655351
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

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