The volume slider on our virtual desktops is a skeuomorphic callback to the volume sliders on professional audio equipment on actual, physical desktops. [Maker Vibe] decided that this skeuomorphism was so last century, and made himself a physical audio control box for his PC.
Since he has three audio outputs he needs to consider, the peripheral he creates could conceivably be called a fader. It certainly has that look, anyway: each output is controlled by a volume slider — connected to a linear potentiometer — and a mute button. Seeing a linear potentiometer used for volume control threw us for a second, until we remembered this was for the computer’s volume control, not an actual volume control circuit. The computer’s volume slider already does the logarithmic conversion. A Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32S3 lives at the heart of this thing, emulating a Bluetooth gamepad using a library by LemmingDev. A trio of LEDs round out the electronics to provide an indicator for which audio channels are muted or active.
Those Bluetooth signals are interpreted by a Python script feeding a software called Voicmeeter Banana, because [Maker Vibe] uses Windows, and Redmond’s finest operating system doesn’t expose audio controls in an easily-accessible way. Voicmeeter Banana (and its attendant Python script) takes care of telling Windows what to do.
The whole setup lives on [Maker Vibe]’s desk in a handsome 3D printed box. He used a Circuit vinyl cutter to cut out masks so he could airbrush different colours onto the print after sanding down the layer lines. That’s another one for the archive of how to make front panels.
If volume sliders aren’t doing it for you, perhaps you’d prefer to control your audio with a conductor’s baton.
So many layers of complexity, to mimic a simple potentiometer.
But if you got 4 gigaflops to burn, why not?
Now if they can only solve the latency problem…
It literally uses potentiometers. What are you on about?
… as a linear encoder in a wireless remote
Let me know, how do you put a potentiometer in the cable of a bluetooth speaker or headphone? Or even the buildin speakers of a notebook?
After all I would say it is a nice gadget, and nice build little project.
I have wireless headphones, not bluetooth but some proprietary low latency stuff, and I have a passive volume control knob in the audio cable to the sender unit. There’s also volume buttons on the headphones, but the levels are too jumpy.
I also have a bluetooth sender dongle I used for the same purpose in the same setup when I was using bluetooth headphones – but then ditched that setup because of the 150 ms lag, and they also seemed to be buffering the audio for a lot more when the signal was weaker. I could have gotten better headphones with 40-50 ms of lag (aptX LL), but then I found my current set which does 16 ms lossless encoding, so I went with that.
I second that.
For this reason I delegate music playing to a standalone sound bar that reads flash cards. The one that has the volume dial – THAT one. If I need to hear them internets, I turn on Blututh (whichever spelking it is now, bluetueth, blootooth, etc) and stream stuffs from my desktop.
It’s Cricut, not Circuit
Faders are nice, but rotaries have more of a “Crank It Up!” feel…
Kids today are like, “This song rocks!!” «click, click, click, click, click» 🙄
Especially the ones that go to 11
This is Spinal Tap
And it’s just as painful now as it was then.
Isn’t this just deej? https://github.com/omriharel/deej
Don’t be silly, of course not. They have added additional layers of complexity by making it Bluetooth gamepad because of course your volume controls should be wireless.
The only additional complexity is a battery, and that’s handled by his dev board.
I’m seeing more and more of these youtube videos where they essentially make a simple device using an MCU and arduino, and slap a very pretty looking 3D printed enclosure. Most YouTube “makers” are mechanical CAD pros, but electronics newbies.
I’m an electronics enthusiast (and an embedded systems engineer at my day job). I don’t find these videos interesting because there are no details, but even worse the core idea is always something quite simple (Bluetooth HID + pots in this case), with a lot of visual fluff around them.
Maybe power electronics is the only field safe from the showmanship scourge. I don’t hate these videos, I just see them as low effort. They probably aren’t but I do feel like they are.
i think the effort is in production, and market research. they’re media personalities first and hackers second (if at all)
such is media. you won’t catch me producing quality youtube videos, that’s for sure
I am more of a hardware guy myself, so I use these types of videos to add to my collection of neat ideas for making enclosures, front panels, and user interfaces.
I do find that at the very least, the people who make things like this have put a fair amount of thought and iteration into a user interface, and it might not be a perfect solution but there is at least always something new to consider even if the hardware side is unintuitive or not ideal.
I will probably never use the majority of these smaller projects as an instruction manual, as I inevitably would want to make changes to fit my usecase anyway.
Most of the stuff released on YouTube these days is created solely to get views for monitization. No passion, no pride, just dollars.
There are of course insightful people sharing their knowledge and experience, but the signal/noise ratio is horrendous, and the suggestion system amplifies the content designed solely for ‘engagement’.
It’s called a control surface or a DAW controller, not a fader. A fader is a single sliding volume control.
You can buy control surfaces in many shapes and sizes, to control digital audio workstations on computers, or to interface with digital mixing consoles (some of which don’t have a control surface built in).
Don’t gloat. One of the top 10 reasons I couldn’t switch to Linux was because I could never get the audio to work right. Most of the time, trying to use the ALSA equalizer or PulseAudio Equalizer simply did nothing, or it had some sort of glitch like muting the center and sub channels when trying to do stereo expansion to 5.1 channels – turns out there was a phase inversion in the math somewhere that zeroed out the signal. Just because the system is “easily-accessible” (to a programmer) doesn’t mean it’s easily configured or controlled by the user. Linux audio was and still is a complete mess.
On Windows there is no equalizer or other tools beyond the system volume slider because the sound chip vendor is supposed to supply the required audio processing objects with their driver package, or you can load your own APO (e.g. Peace). If you load up the generic drivers and nothing else, you get nothing – it’s that simple. This has the advantage that the hardware vendor can implement special features and functions without relying on 3rd party software to support it first, and then the 3rd party software can adopt support for those features once they prove to be useful.
The Linux “ecosystem” is backwards, inwards looking and anti-innovative in this sense, because it requires that the system developers implement the support first before hardware vendors can sell the hardware. But that won’t happen because the developers won’t see a reason to write code to support hardware that doesn’t yet exist. Even if the HW vendor did add some feature, the users don’t have access to it until someone writes the code to support it, and if the users don’t use the feature (because it doesn’t work) then nobody sees any reason to add support. Catch-22.
The motive behind this is that the HW vendor should go to the system developers and/or the community and beg them to add support for their upcoming products, giving up the source code to support their hardware instead of supplying the required driver binaries and user apps themselves. But this gives the system developers tremendous power as gatekeepers to the market and the platform, and in practice they’ll just say “no” because they’re too busy elsewhere and see no reason to support niche products. It leads to a situation where everything “works” to the lowest common denominator and innovation is effectively suppressed.
Compare and contrast this to the case where a government of a state controls the economy and effectively gatekeeps which companies can sell which products on the market: you need an inside man in the government to lobby for your company and against the competition. This is what’s known as “regulatory capture” and “crony capitalism”. This is one of the fundamental reasons why our economies were taken over by megacorporations whose lobbying is suppressing their smaller and weaker competitors regardless of their merits.
The idea of “managed capitalism” is sweet and alluring, but the people who call for such systems forget that this power never extends to all the people. It’s only a good system if you get to be on top of it. Likewise, in a system like Linux, it’s nice for all the developers and programmers who have the skill and influence to steer the thing, but terrible for the users who have no control over anything in the lack of free competition. The openness of the platform is an illusion.
Imagine the case where Microsoft and Windows didn’t exist and Linux was the dominant operating system. The top hardware manufacturers would capture the whole developing process and turn the operating system into a platform to sell their own hardware, booting everyone else out by refusing to collaborate. Kinda like what Apple does already, or the “wintel” collaboration back in the day.
They’d refuse to have stable API/ABIs and maintain the fragmentation and balkanization of the ecosystem to prevent universal support for software and hardware in order to control what and whose products can exist on the platform. In the name of “Open Source”, they’d demand all the other vendors to give up their source code to be added to the system for support, which in turn means giving up their products that can then be trivially copied by the dominant HW manufacturers.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
It might be sampling bias, but most of the people I know who are really into audio (or professionals) use Macs.
Audio on Linux has gotten better since your last attempt, with Pipewire and JACK, but it’s still not exactly great. I’m pretty sure FreeBSD still has Linux beat when it comes to beats.
So does Windows
Also, what does “since your last attempt” mean? Do you think that [Dude] writes audio drivers for Linux?
Probably, but the more I search for the point the more it looks like there’s just no proper end-user software to handle graphic EQ and routing/effects. They’re either too simple, incomplete, or not maintained anymore since 5 years ago. Then there’s the point of, if I install distro X, does the software exist in its repository? Is it updated or some ancient version with bugs? Do I need to upgrade to the breaking edge to have it? When a system update comes by, does my configuration suddenly break?
Then there’s the point that even if I do have the software, does it actually work with my hardware? Flip a coin, heads it works, tails it doesn’t. Did the developers bother to write full drivers for my sound chip, or is it just “It plays sound, we’re done here”.
I have two EQs running, one which corrects the sound for my 5.1 setup with proper delays and corrections for each speaker, and another that mixes and delay-cross-fades the audio to the remaining 2 channels to send to my headphones so they both sound equally nice. Can you describe what I would have to do to get this working under Linux, using an app that I can just point and click with sliders instead of diving down to some configuration files and scripting it? Something that isn’t horribly buggy and broken, and which distro would I need to use to have it in the regular distribution?
Linux audio has always been “not the faint of heart”. ALSA and Pulse are quite confusing to the uninitiated. Pipewire has lessened the pain. Still, I have run 20+ channel live recording sessions and currently run a triamp system with the crossover all digital under Debian or Manjaro.
Linux and nobody is mentioning JACK? It’s not mainstream, but if you need to define routing between applications and multi channel inputs / outputs (even on multiple sound cards), it’s awesome.
Call me when it is mainstream, so I don’t have to go out of my way to make it work.
Wirepipe is new audio for Linux and can play multible Bluetooth speakers at same time
both of the negative comments here about linux audio were hard for me to decipher until i realized they were trying to do unusual things with stock pulseaudio setups. unusual and stock are enemies. isn’t that true on windows too? it’s certainly true on mac.
Stock is good – stock means it works “out of the box”.
On Windows, even if you do something “unusual” that doesn’t come with the official driver setup, it’s just a matter of clicking setup.exe on the APO and then using the app – and it works flawlessly because the audio system is designed that way. No trawling the net for install scripts, no writing configuration files, no hacking and pulling hair trying to make it work for two weeks and then giving up.
Sadly, “unusual” on Win11 is “Anything beyond web-sourced content, a single microphone, and a single output.”
Win11 makes anything more complex a clumsy mixture of Win11 controls, legacy control panel controls, and vendor adjustments. And then Win11 routinely breaks multi-input or multi-output configurations at every update, and even when simply moving a device from one USB port to another.
I’ve taken to doing my audio processing on an outboard mixer because Win11 is so frustrating and unstable.
I honestly see that SOME of the physical world controls, ie sliders, buttons, blinkie lights, etc, just CANNOT be left virtual.
Things i miss
normal pop-up power buttons (yes, maybe with a nice shiny red LED embedded within that would INDICATE that the thing is POWERED ON)
actual volume dial/slider, so that I can DIAL DOWN volume when needed
a set of buttons that launch apps I use all the time (file explorer, browser, etc) – there aren’t many, so maybe 6 – 10 will suffice
network engage/disengage – yes, a pop-up button similar to the power button, so you can physically cut-off the networking in an emergency.
Why? Because it is common sense, and universal among pretty much all computers I’ve ever worked with. Also, direct access, no intermediaries that can be remotely deactivated/hakkd.
Also, the nice button to IMMEDIATELY deactivate any bloatware not authorized by me. Like bam, done, not like “queue the request to the unknown entity I cannot access or see”.
Designers of GUI actually SAW that coming – in the 1980s, no less, and tried to keep important things at hand – hence the (now mostly useless) F-keys stuck above the keyboard. THOSE supposed to be the important functional keys, standardized and all. Fell to the wayside by now – most are not really useful (try F1 and see if it fetches any help files – not always, now try ESC to close an app – aha, it is no longer the hatch it supposed to be, now try F9, what exactly does it do?, etc).
Call me old fart, but humans need human-oriented controls that actually do their supposed task the should be doing. As far as slider goes – it clearly shows the volume level – THAT’S why it cannot be replaced with anything else – same for the power button, if it is up, the power is on, etc.