Comment 17 for bug 619194

Yeah the concept of "default" or "master" is somewhat blurred these days and IMO should be fully automatic in most cases (or at least have an "Auto" tickbox before allowing manual overrides.

The reason I say this is due to the fact that Phonon has multiple categories. The "Default" category makes sense in most cases but what if you have Amarok (Music) playing some tunes? Your "Default" device might not be your "Music" device, so should the media keys on your keyboard control the Default device or the Music device in this case? I'd personally suggest that it should control your Music device.

Sadly Phonon has no API to enumerate streams and which devices are actively playing to allow kmix to make such decisions, so while I would agree in principle that the "phonon settings" should be used, it's likely far more practical to get said setting directly from PA (as with "Phonon settings" are actually just pushed to PA with this kind of setup anyway).

Now we're hoping that (eventually) we'll be able to redo the whole routing system in PA thanks to help from some Intel folks using it for IVI purposes. With this in place I think it would be the right time to get this bit of kmix fixed up.