kurmikon added a comment.
Pulseaudio is an abstraction layer over alsa. You, as a developer, can record sources in many ways, but since it's an abstraction layer, you can't be really sure whether the source is a microphone or not. There's a discussion on github where a user was asking on differences between speakers attached to the system and network output: PulseEffects funder said there's no difference, since Pulseaudio exposes them the same way. Maybe there should be something to discover it in some complicated ways, but that's also too difficult to implement in a simple desktop environment applet. No offense, but who designed this indicator had in mind one only use case. Unfortunately there are also other cases and Plasma gives a wrong information in those events. Besides, it's also not coherent. I have two laptops. On one I don't have the microphone and no message is shown. On the other the microphone is integrated, always connected, and the message is shown: "PulseEffects is using the microphone". That's not true, I'm using PulseEffects to apply volume normalization on output sources. What can we do? Maybe we can exclude PulseEffects with a string comparison or a reg exp from the app list? Nope, because it can record from the mic in other use case, so that would be in conflict with the applet primary purpose. So, please, don't mock the users and let's show the truth. If you don't like "monitoring", we can say "recording", "using", "handling". But not microphone. An audio stream. REPOSITORY R115 Plasma Audio Volume Applet REVISION DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/D29312 To: kurmikon, #vdg, #plasma, drosca, broulik Cc: mart, nicolasfella, ngraham, plasma-devel, Orage, LeGast00n, The-Feren-OS-Dev, cblack, jraleigh, zachus, fbampaloukas, ragreen, ZrenBot, himcesjf, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, ahiemstra
