Saturday, March 27, 2010

My "Just Works" Audio Experience in Lucid

I've been doing a lot of desktop based VOIP calls lately, so decided to invest in a slightly nice set of headphones. I noticed that when my computer's fan is running, it adds a lot of noise to my normal audio card input, so I decided to go with a USB headset. I booted up, plugged into a USB port, and pick "Sound Preferencecs..." from the Sound Menu, and there was my new headphones an mic. A couple of tests, and yes, it works perfectly. First time, no configuration. Sweeeeet.

8 comments:

  1. When you unplug the headphones, does it automatically switch to normal speakers? When you plug them back in, does it automatically switch back?

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  2. 1. Yes, changes to my other speakers, mic when I unplug.
    2. Does not change back when I plug in, but i would not want it to. I assume this is by design. The headphones and mic do instantly show up in my Preferences tough.

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  3. I wish this were true for me. I support Linux on the server as my job but have yet to switch to Linux on my desktop or laptop because Ubuntu's support of Apple's computers' audio is awful. In past versions the defaults had a speaker muted resulting in the headphone port not working and a lack of bass. Unmuting greatly increased the quality but it was still awful compared to OS X. Lucid seems like maybe it fixed the muted speaker problem but the sound is still really tinny and awful.

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  4. I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago. I have an USB-capable guitar effects pedal that I don't use much to record music because it always has been a pain to set up in Ubuntu. Fear no more, now in Karmic it shows in the sound preferences dialog as an input (and output) device. Click on it and that's it. Awesome!

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  5. Wow, that is good news. Improvements and refinement are continually happening. Sometimes it may take a step back but next next time it'll two steps forward, never a dull moment.

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  6. What's the reference of the headset? I assume by the screenshot that the brand is Logitech.

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  7. Oh, yes, great job Ubuntu/Canonical! Oh, wait. Maybe it wasn't actually Ubuntu/Canonical that did all this work? Right, it's all coming from Fedora/Red Hat. Now, how about a little bit of credit where credit is due?

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