The Canonical Face

Documentation / Contents - Audio Panel

• Overview of the Audio Panel
  • What It Controls, and What It Does Not
  • Two Faces
  • If There Is No Sound Card
• Anatomy of the Window
  • The Device Area
  • A Strip, Top to Bottom
  • The Control Rows
  • The Message Line
  • Selecting a Strip
• Setting Levels
  • The Faders
  • Group Sliders
  • Mute
  • Monitor
  • Meter
  • Sample Rate
  • What Is Not Persisted
• Meters, Peaks, and Clipping
  • Turning Them On
  • The dB Ladder
  • How They Move
  • When There Is No Signal
• Devices and Backends
  • Backends
  • The Default Input and Output
  • Choosing What Is Shown
  • Pinning a Device
  • Input Source and Output Destination
• The Menus
  • File
  • Selected
  • View
  • Options
  • Default
  • Help
  • The Button 3 Menu
• Dialogs
  • Open and Save As
  • Device Preferences
  • About
• Keys and the Command Line
  • Keys
  • The Headless Command Line
  • Diagnostics
    • Finding the Right Mixer Stage
• Settings and Files
  • The Configuration File
  • What Is Deliberately Not Saved
  • Environment Variables
• The Canonical Face
  • What Is Different
  • What Works
  • What Is Inert
  • Honest About Its Own Evidence
• The Audio Panel and Desktop Sounds
  • The Difference
  • Which One Do I Want

Other cards

• Copyright Information

The Canonical Face

cymix --canonical

This face reproduces the measured appearance of the IRIX Audio Panel. It is for looking at, for comparing against captures, and for preservation. It is not the face to mix with.

What Is Different

• The window is a fixed size and cannot be resized.
• There are exactly two panels, an input and an output, in fixed pixel positions. There is no strip per device.
• Only core X fonts are used. Canonical applications never touch Xft, because their layouts are measured against 1993 bitmaps.
• There are no dialogs at all.

What Works

The device names, gain, sample rate and mute shown are LIVE, read from the probe and the control backend. The faders write hardware gain, and the Mute button sets mute where a mixer path exists.

What Is Inert

A great deal, on purpose. The original is being reproduced, not reimplemented.

• File > Open, Save, Save As and Revert echo their own names to the message line and do nothing else.
• Selected > Input Source, Output Destination, Sample Rate, Make Default Input and Preferences... are all insensitive.
• Options > Audio Queue Monitor and both Default entries are insensitive.
• The Meter and Monitor checkboxes are insensitive; there is nothing behind them on this face.
• The accelerator text beside Click for Help is text only. No accelerator is bound.

Meters on This Face

The canonical input panel has two meters and the output panel has none. Where the backend exposes no true peak, these meters fall back to showing the input GAIN, and warn once that they are doing so. The advanced face never does this. See Meters, Peaks, and Clipping.

Honest About Its Own Evidence

Starting this face prints that the reproduction is provisional, and why: five of the six menus were never captured, one band of the input panel is obscured by screen damage in the capture, and a non-default device panel was never seen at all.

So the item order, the ellipses, the mnemonics and the accelerators in every menu except Help are inference from the manual rather than observation. The Help menu alone is verbatim from a capture.

Read the face with that in mind, and do not cite it as evidence of what the 1993 panel did.

Next

• Overview of the Audio Panel
• The Audio Panel and Desktop Sounds