Volume notifications over multimedia content are annoying

[Ted Gould]

This doesn't work today, but assuming bug 1378920 gets fixed the user experience will be:

You're playing a video. You hit the volume up key. The audio of your program will be reduced, the alert sound will play, and then the volume of the program will be restored. As you're trying to hear the program, this goes directly against what you're trying to do.

Possible solutions:

- No audio or even visual notifications when multimedia is active
- Visual but no audio notifications when multimedia is active
- Visual but no audio when anything but alert is active (phone, alarm, etc.)
- No change, this is desired behavior

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound#notification>: "When the primary sound output changes for any reason except an app request, or when the sound volume changes for any reason, a confirmation bubble should appear ... In addition, *if* audio is not currently playing through the multimedia role, a subtle noise should play for you to gauge the change in volume."

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

IMHO we should show the visual but only playing the audio notification if the active role is 'alert'.

We'd need a hint for that (from indicator-sound), and that hint might also be useful to show different icons as well (multimedia, phone, alert, alarm).

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I wonder if it shouldn't work the other way... Is it possible for role "alert" to be corked when "multimedia" is active? We'd need a different role for incoming call though.

BTW, related bug #1291458.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

When you're listening to music, probably you still want to hear new messages, alarms, etc. So blocking the "alert" role altogether would be overkill.

Probably you don't, though, want to hear audio feedback for the volume change itself. You're already getting more relevant feedback from the audio that you're listening to.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

Okay, clarified a bit on IRC. We will show a notification of volume change, but no audio when using the multimedia role.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Specification updated. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sound?action=diff&rev2=131&rev1=130>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-sound - 12.10.2+15.04.20141105-0ubuntu1

---------------
indicator-sound (12.10.2+15.04.20141105-0ubuntu1) vivid; urgency=medium

  [ Ted Gould ]
  * Remove various Vala warnings
  * Show notifications on volume change (LP: #1378564, #1378961)
  * Warn on high audio levels when using headphones (LP: #1232633, #1373404)
  * service.vala: don't call set_volume unnecessarily (LP: #1381871)
  * Integration test for audio roles
  * Integration test for silent mode
  * Ensure the greeter menu matches whether song metadata should be shown,
    and update the metadata based on the new setting. (LP: #1358340)
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Wed, 05 Nov 2014 17:56:29 +0000

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Verified fixed in Ubuntu 15.04 r248. However, this seems to have been fixed by dropping the audio part of volume change feedback altogether. When that is restored, this will need to be re-fixed in the specified way.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The lack of audio feedback for volume change is bug 1436801.