Update freedesktop sound theme sounds to have consistent max volume
Describe your issue
I'm running pmOS edge with phosh on a PinePhone Pro as my daily driver for the past few weeks. One issue I have regularly noticed is that while the incoming phone call sound was plenty loud enough to hear, the SMS alert sound (message-new-instant) was whisper quiet and I was consistently missing texts. I looked into the issue and discovered that the audio file itself is just much quieter.
I opened the "phone-incoming-call" and "message-new-instant" sounds up in Audacity and you can tell from the waveform that the phone call one is much louder. I ended up writing a script using ffmpeg that adjusts all the sound files to have the same max volume, normalizing them to have similar volume profiles.
Here is the repo I'm using: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/adamplumb/xdg-sound-theme-normalized/-/tree/master/
The "stereo" folder is the new normalized sounds and the "stereo-original" folder contains the originals from the xdg-sound-theme repo. Personally I like the more consistent/punchy volumes but I recognize this is very subjective and maybe some of these sounds are meant to be very quiet. I also did open an MR with the xdg-sound-theme repo but I'm unsure if they will want to take this on (no response yet).
My hope with this issue is just to start a conversation. At the very least I would love to see the default "message-new-instant" sound be louder and more audible. I can easily do it for myself, but figured others would appreciate the improvement.
Is this something the team is interested in in any way? I'm happy to work out a solution that makes sense, either here or at the Alpine level. We could overlay a pmOS sound theme that replaces some of the sounds with our own, or do the whole thing, or just add it as an optional theme package that users can install if they want to opt in. What do you think?
Here you can see the visual difference in volume between "phone-incoming-call" and "message-new-instant"...
What device are you using?
pine64-pinephone-pro
On what postmarketOS version did you encounter the issue?
-
edge ( master
branch) -
v22.12
-
I confirm that the issue still is present after running sudo apk upgrade -a
On what environment did you encounter the issue?
Environments
-
Phosh -
Plasma Mobile -
Sxmo (Wayland/Sway) Please post the output of sxmo_version.sh
-
Other: Please fill out
How did you get postmarketOS image?
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from https://images.postmarketos.org -
I built it using pmbootstrap -
It was preinstalled on my device
What's the build date of the image? (in yyyy-mm-dd format)
20230322-0652-postmarketOS-edge-phosh-22.2-pine64-pinephonepro-installer.img.xz