The worst volume control UI in the world (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#31

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:22 AM UTC

FriedPickles wrote: post #27

temporallobe wrote: post #7

Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.

Ford moved volume control to the touchscreen, but people wanted a knob. Solution? They stuck a knob to the touchscreen. Under the knob is an artificial "finger" that touches the screen. I haven't used it personally so all I can say is it's a hilarious solution. https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/02/im-obsessed-with-the-ford-...

Tesla’s have great physical controls for the stereo under your left thumb. For all the complaints about the Tesla touchscreen, the Model 3 has really well thought-out physical controls.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#32

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

arriu wrote: post #15

The one asking the user to make noise as loud as you want the volume to be made me laugh but it does have a hidden feature... It will never be lower than ambiant noise. Perhaps a desireable feature?

Some sort of “set to X decibels louder than ambient noise” feature would be pretty amazing, actually.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#33

Post by Zak » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

Clippy may be a joke, but my phone actually does this (and yours likely does too).

In principle, if my headphone volume was actually loud enough to damage my hearing, I'd like to be told about it, but a given reality is the volume setting doesn't produce the same loudness with different headphones, which usually results in an inconvenience when my headphones aren't actually very loud.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#34

Post by fomine3 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:26 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #24

rectang wrote: post #6

Nearly all volume controls suck because by and large the software world is ignorant of the fact that loudness scales logarithmically. 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.

This is in the same category of error as most programmers thinking that sRGB uses a linear light model. They try to do arithmetic like blending or blurring on the raw image data this inevitably does the wrong thing. Similarly, most non-AAA game engines ignore the sRGB tone curve and treat all inputs and outputs as if they were linear, which results in unexpected brightness shifts in textures. Up until very recently,…

Could you provide good documentation about such thing?

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#35

Post by fomine3 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:29 AM UTC

YouTube Music on browser only offers single usable volume level: mute+1. Upper is not usable since volume is too high. (So some of "worst volume control" on article is better than this since it's somewhat configurable). It is really weird since YouTube on same browser offers wide range of usable volume level.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#36

Post by stefan_ » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:30 AM UTC

I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents as an app volume control but then simply controls the global device volume. Fuck off, you are not the only app running.

But that comes second to the microphone gain control, which Teams similarly exerts unilateral control over - only this time through an automated algorithm that for some microphone types just ends up muting them entirely. It's wild, you can go into the Windows gain control settings and see the slider wiggle around.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#37

Post by bigiain » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #13

rectang wrote: post #6

Nearly all volume controls suck because by and large the software world is ignorant of the fact that loudness scales logarithmically. 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.

It’s weird how I nominally know this but never really thought about the implications... How does the hardware world do it? I’d expect the normal way to make a volume control would be to have an adjustable-gain amplifier using the standard opamp circuit somewhere, but those aren’t logarithmic in any resistance you could wire to a knob, are they? (Yes, I am deeply ignorant about electronics.)

Logarithmic potentiometers.

https://learnabout-electronics.org/Resistors/resistors_09a.p...

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#38

Post by ajsnigrutin » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:32 AM UTC

FriedPickles wrote: post #27

temporallobe wrote: post #7

Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.

Ford moved volume control to the touchscreen, but people wanted a knob. Solution? They stuck a knob to the touchscreen. Under the knob is an artificial "finger" that touches the screen. I haven't used it personally so all I can say is it's a hilarious solution. https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/02/im-obsessed-with-the-ford-...

They took a simple device, that was easy to make, and every china basement factory could make, and made it needlessly complicated.

Now we have a chip shortage, and not even a radio with volume control can be made without a chip that is backordered for 1y+

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#39

Post by boustrophedon » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

fomine3 wrote: post #34

jiggawatts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in the same category of error as most programmers thinking that sRGB uses a linear light model. They try to do arithmetic like blending or blurring on the raw image data this inevitably does the wrong thing. Similarly, most non-AAA game engines ignore the sRGB tone curve and treat all inputs and outputs as if they were linear, which results in unexpected brightness shifts in textures. Up until very recently,…

Could you provide good documentation about such thing?

There was a great post about gamma and sRGB from 2016 on HN a couple weeks ago[0] with some discussion[1]

[0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721094

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#40

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 12:34 AM UTC

worst real-life one I saw was shaped like a knob. You had to move the mouse in a circle to move the volume up and down. I don't recall what software now, I think it was some random MP3 player crapware that came preinstalled on a computer.