Usability: call audio not practically usable under phosh

Right now, postmarketOS doesn't ship the mobian patches to make wys do the audio routing changes automatically when a call comes in. The wiki advises to manually switch to "Make A Phone Call".

However, I tried this out for some days and realized this is completely impractical: 1. phone ringing is silent unless audio profile is "Make A Phone Call". Therefore, I am bound to miss most/all calls if I ever listen to a podcast or the like. 2. there is no quick button to switch over audio once I notice an actual call, which means even if I notice it I can't switch the audio profile fast enough to take it.

This means that effectively, under phosh incoming calls aren't usable. (Unless you never use hifi audio ever...) That is quite a big problem in daily use for me, and I imagine for many others as well.

I just wanted to point this out, since right now the wiki ( https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Phosh#Calls ) appears to suggest calls are in an okay enough state with the manual profile switching. But with this practicality issue I think it is in a worse state than one might think

Thanks for reporting, @ell1e! I've updated the wiki to link to this issue.

Personally, this week I will work on everything that relates to booting the PinePhone for the first time with the on-device installer, doing the installation and rebooting into the installed system for the first time to make updates. Because that's important for the factory image. This audio routing issue is also very important, but it can be fixed slightly afterwards through updates. So I could look into this next week or so, if it is still unresolved.

If you have time, do you want to take a shot at it now?

By Oliver Smith on 2020-06-22T06:03:29

mentioned in commit wiki@71ae9dee

By postmarketOS Wiki bot on 2020-06-22T06:43:38

I did ask around already for a bit for what appears to be the issue:

The hackish way to fix it would probably just to copy the mobian patch unchanged. However, I did make a ticket here with the mobian wys packagers that maybe it might be worth getting it into a better shape and upstream it: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/packages/wys/-/issues/1

Basically, currently the patch seems to rip out the software audio routing of the librem 5, and replace it with the hardware audio of the PinePhone (rather than adding it as an additional option with a device-specific build flag): https://gitlab.com/mobian1/packages/wys/-/blob/mobian/debian/patches/0001-Simplify-daemon-to-only-switch-card-profiles.patch

I'm not awfully familiar with glib/gobject however. Still, it seems like in the spirit of postmarketOS of trying to avoid too much derivation from upstream (which I actually think is a great idea) the best medium term solution would probably be to try to make an upstreamable patch. I'm honestly still a bit torn on whether I can make the time to look into that so don't count on me for now. But I might do some more code inspection and see if I can at least make a mental plan of what could possibly be done. If something more concrete comes of it, I'll let you know here.

By Ellie on 2020-06-22T10:33:38

added type::feature ui-phosh labels

Just as a note, I think I'm better off sticking with osk-sdl and other areas where I can help more easily for now, I'm a bit swamped (I used SDL2 for years so there I actually know what I am doing) so don't wait for me to take this wys/pulseaudio thing over soon

By Ellie on 2020-07-09T19:41:30

mentioned in issue #558 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-11T10:34:23

A MR is open to have a separate package with mobian's patched wys, until this is upstreamed properly: !1406 (merged)

By Oliver Smith on 2020-07-11T10:35:38

!1406 (merged) is merged and audio switching has been confirmed to happen automatically now, closing this.

By Bart Ribbers on 2020-07-23T09:04:54

closed