WADder Blog

Forum Disabled

It has come time for WADder to end. Please contact Xuzz at icefire@xuzz.net to discuss if you want to continue the site, note, I will only send the forum database and files to someone I trust and who has a host and  can afford it.

It was fun guys.

Volume Control

One particular aspect of user interfaces (and hardware, too) has been bothering me lately — volume control. I just built myself a new computer, a desktop, and of course I need some speakers. So, I picked up a cheap pair at Staples, something low end by Realtec, but they get the job done. I don’t listen to that much music, so they aren’t great quality, but least they aren’t tinny like my laptop’s. Those are horrid, at anything above around 30% on the volume scale, they start doing weird popping noises, and then they get tinny, and so on. But that’s another story, that I may (or may not) write about later.

Anyway, so I installed my new speakers finally in my new computer, and I wanted to test them out. The first attempt was a failure. It took me around five minutes to figure it out, but apparently the speakers have two volume sliders on them: one on the top, and one on the back. Seems that just turning up the one on the top didn’t do anything — you have to use the one in the back to turn them on. Why they need two sliders, I have no clue, and especially two sliders on the same freaking speaker. Whatever. Anyway, I got them working by turning up the volume on both of them, and a quick test by pressing the volume-up and volume-down keys on my Apple keyboard showed that they were working. Yay.

Next, I wanted to listen to some music on the new speakers, to see how they sounded. So, I fired up iTunes and pressed the big play button, expecting some sound to come out. No such luck. Instead, I was greeted by an eerie silence. Was my hacked-together audio driver setup not compatible with iTunes? Luckily, the problem was much simpler. The iTunes volume slider was at the bottom. I dragged it up to the top, and the music started playing — a little to loudly, though, and I had to go and adjust it to something sane.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I now have a total of four points where my computer’s volume can be controlled. Two on the speakers, one built into the Mac OS, and one in whatever application I’m currently using. Even that isn’t fair — I use many different programs that output audio, from YouTube, VLC, iTunes, and such to things like Spore and SNES 9x. I believe that every single one of those has a different volume slider. Basically, this situation is unmanageable. Sometimes — at night, for instance — I prefer my sound much quieter. Other times, I want it louder. With the current setup, where do I change the volume?

Unconsciously, I’ve had a solution to this problem that I’ve been using for as long as I can remember. Basically, what I do, is set each application and speaker to the maximum volume, and try to only use the system volume control. Sadly, this method isn’t perfect. Some applications are louder than others, and need to be set to the non-maximum volume, but then later I forget why I did that, and reset it to the top. Other times, I might want to quickly turn down the volume of the song I’m listening to so I can hear a game sound effects, but keept he game’s sound all the way up. Can’t do that by only changing the system sound level.

Has anyone else had this issue? Have you guys come up with any solutions I should try?

Leathl

Leathl has done an amazing job of re-creating all of the WADder programs in .NET. I’d like to put this here that I fully think his work is SUPER-AWESOME and hope he makes them way better than WADder ever was.

Also, check out my iPhone apps in Cydia :p.