Issue 73 of Commit Digest mentioned that there will be no Mixer in Phonon. It was however not explained that the missing Mixer would only affect application developers.
The Commit Digest Issue 73 just picked up the SVN commit comment:
Matthias Kretz committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/phonon/xine:
no mixer in Phonon for 4.0
This led to the question if we will have a mixer at all in KDE 4.0 or if that means that Phonon would not be able to mix different sound sources.
Matthias Kretz answered to these questions and assumptions:
let me define what mixer will not be in 4.0:
– There is a hardware mixer in some soundcards (no way to not support it 😉 )
– There’s a software mixer provided by dmix (will be supported)
– There’s the possibility to create multiple AudioOutput objects in one application, those outputs will use sw/hw mixing on the driver/soundcard
– Last one: create two MediaObjects and connect them to one AudioOutput. That’s the functionality that won’t make it into 4.0. It’s basically impossible to implement using xine anyway.
Since this is a bit tricky to understand I asked him to clarify what this means for the user, and the answer was pretty clear:
It will make no difference for you as a KDE user. It only makes a difference for the developer using the Phonon API.
Yes, you are able to mute your speakers when you have an incoming call on your USB-headset.
So that’s sorted out as well. And we have one more feature which will likely have its first appearance in KDE 4.1.
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