mycroft wrote:
One potential issue that I see is that an application will have its volume control and Windows will also have its own separate volume control associated with that application which could potentially make things even more confusing unless the two are linked together bidirectionally. I don't know if you could force an application to change its internal volume level when adjusting it from the windows volume control.
Another thing i'd like to see is improved microphone callibration so you don't have to fiddle with the mic and line in levels manually, and perhaps support for changing audio ports between input and output. Hopefully they bring in all the features that are now included in the numerous crappy sound card control panels that come with the hardware into Windows itself so I can do away with those altogether.
Improved Mic callibration is a part of what we're doing. And suppoting the audio port remapping you're describing is actually a feature of the HDAudio support (it requires new audio hardware to enable that support).
Also, you may not have seen it in the UI, but we've put a great deal of effort into ensuring that the relationship between the various app volumes and the system volume is transparent and seamless.
And yes, you can force the apps volume control to change from inside Windows.
This works because every apps volume runs through the audio engine and the policy agent in the engine accesses the same volume control the app does.
Having said that, if the app's volume slider is implemented on a DirectX secondary buffer, then we can't control that volume slider - because the volume attenuation occurs before it hits the global audio engine. We may be able to do something about it, but no promises.