Comment 5 for bug 1440675

The idea of firing up alsamixer was born after I have played with PortMixer. I cam to the conclusion that a pane to access the hardware controls will be almost an exact copy of alsamixer using Qt.

There seams to be no strong reason to do the work of copy alsamixer into Mixxx if the Linux community in pleased with the user experience of alsamixer.
The extra knob in the sound preferences does not hurt, It actually helps. And it end ups exactly where experienced users will end up as well.

Mixxx is in the responds to configure the hardware. It sets the route towards the hardware bypassing the OS facilities.
For me there is no difference between setting the audio buffer size the sample rate, and the hardware control offered by the sound hardware. Many other Applications like Audacity and VLC player are able to access these hardware controls.

So we actually have a problem. Do you have an alternative solution for this?

> Just having a button that opens alsamixer doesn't really solve the problem.

Yes it is not entirely solved. A complete solution will allow to map the Hardware slider by control objects. But it is a good band aid until we can access the controls directly.
For now it just make it more obvious that is is required to use alsamixer and not the pulse stuff provided by the distros to access the soundcard hardware. Thats the stumbling block.