Ambience sound settings get lost/overwritten when switching between ambiences

Welllll…

There still is com.nokia.profiled, a.k.a. profiled.service with settings and customization possibilities in ~/.profiled/*.

Maybe it’s possible to define a custom “silent-ring-only” profile there and switch to it using profileclient?

I seem to remember doing this either on the N9 or in the ancient SailfishOS past.

Also:

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Oh, thanks, I’ll investigate it today!

nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ devel-su pkcon install profileclient
nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ profileclient -l
ambience
general
meeting*
outdoors
silent

nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ cat > 60.sailfish_custom.ini
[night]

ringing.alert.type           = Ringing
ringing.alert.volume         = 40

vibrating.alert.enabled      = Off

keypad.sound.level           = 0
system.sound.level           = 0
touchscreen.sound.level      = 0

sms.alert.enabled            = Off
sms_fg.alert.enabled         = Off
im.alert.enabled             = Off
im_fg.alert.enabled          = Off
email.alert.enabled          = Off
voip.alert.enabled           = Off
calendar.alert.enabled       = Off

clock.alert.enabled          = On

^D

nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ devel-su mv 60.sailfish_custom.ini /etc/profiled/
nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ systemctl --user restart profiled
nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ profileclient -l
ambience
general
meeting*
night
outdoors
silent



nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ profileclient -V night
...

nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ profileclient -pnight
nemo@PGXperiiia10:~/.profiled $ profileclient -l
ambience
general
meeting
night*
outdoors
silent


3 Likes

Wow, that’s amazing! I didn’t even know about its existence! (C) 2008 Nokia Corporation, I love this :grinning:

When I select silent, the Silent quick toggle button automatically becomes active. Which gives me an idea of making a Night/Bedside quick toggle button for my custom profile and switching it with a single button tap from the top menu.

Thank you so much @nephros! This is definitely going to make me keep using SFOS :grinning:

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Done! Now I have a Night/Bedside Mode that I can switch on/off with a single quick toggle button press. I even created a custom icon for it :grinning: At the same time, I removed Ambiences from the top menu because they are completely unusable until Jolla fixes them…

Works like a charm! THANK YOU @nephros for all your invaluable help and information!

Now the last thing to do is to add an indicator shown in the status bar, reminding when my “Bedside” profile is active. It turns out that it is actually a piece of cake, a minor edit of /usr/share/jolla-lipstick-home-qt5/statusarea/ProfileStatusIndicator.qml will do the job. But it’s almost 4 am and I’m too sleepy now so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow :sleeping:

3 Likes

Back to the ambience bug, the story continues. It turns out that even without switching ambiences strange and erroneous things happen.

I’ve got all notification sounds configured, which can be seen on the Settings / Sounds page. I configured all those sounds in the “Water” ambience, using that ambience’s page in Settings / Ambiences.

Initially, all those “actions” were visible in that ambience’s settings, but then (without any modifications from my side, and without ever switching to any other ambience) most of the “actions” (i.e. notification sound settings) DISAPPEARED from that ambience’s settings page, and only two remained - chat and calendar - i.e. the same two which don’t get overwritten when switching ambiences.

In Settings / Sounds all notification types are still correctly visible (and they continue to work). They disappear from the ambience settings page only.

The following screenshots show how all notification sounds remain visible on the Settings / Sounds page, but on the “Water” ambience settings page (through which all those sounds were configured) most of them suddenly disappeared and only calendar and chat remained.


(sorry for screenshots in Polish, didn’t have time to switch the device to English)

@jolla (or should I call @flypig ?), please take a look at these bugs as they really make the whole ambience system completely unusable now.

Perhaps it is connected to profiled - after all that sets and changes tones as well.

I’ve just switched between several different profiles to test this and nothing happened. So it must be something different causing it. I’ll keep watching it.

I’ve rebooted my 10 III (it’s been quite some time since I did it previously) and after reboot the sound settings in the active ambience became crippled to just calendar and chat. So it is reboot when it happens.

The whole ambience system is completely broken.

Completely broken is a bit harsh, been using one ambience as silent mode, just instead of using ‘no sound’ just by using volume at zero and another for outside with volume maxed (and one for normal use etc) and it’s been working fine, sure you found a bug, but the fact it’s been unnoticed by anyone for so long means it’s a rather rare way of using that feature, pretty sure it’ll get fixed sooner rather than later as that’s jolla’s feature over which they have full control vs bugs with android apps not complying fully with aosp or hw bugs ignored by sony etc

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Well, I only expressed my opinion about the state that IMO the ambience system is in, and IMO it is currently completely unreliable (if it can alter/mute most of its notification sounds by itself at any time without user’s knowledge), and therefore actually hardly usable for anyone who can’t afford missing important calls or SMS or emails.

I didn’t criticize or complain about Jolla, etc. Just summed up discovering multiple problems affecting not only ambience switching but even altering their settings upon simple reboot. Which actually makes them unusable in such a state. I mean their actual intended purpose, i.e. switching between sets of sound and visual settings, and not some crippled workarounds like only having different volume levels per ambience due to everything else not working as it should. While it may be entirely sufficient for some people to only switch volume levels, it definitely isn’t what ambiences were meant for.

I think that the problem is actually quite important. While maybe as long as one uses only one ambience (or only changes volume levels between ambiences) the bugs don’t manifest themselves and nothing bad happens, it is enough that one day you switch to some other ambience (even just by mistake) and notification sounds may get cleared without your knowledge, and you’ll miss important communication, or your alarm clock won’t wake you up for an important meeting. Which already was the case for me, and that’s how I discovered it.

P.S. I didn’t urge Jolla to fix this bug sooner than they can, either. But I guess that for every person submitting such bug reports (which does involve certain workload - not only the information provided but also multiple tests, checking logs, two movies recorded, screenshots taken, etc.) it would be really nice if they were at least confirming having acknowledged it.

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I still think ‘completely broken’ is a bit overblown, in that specific scenario bug does manifest and if you keep pushing that bug you will find even more unexpected/undocumented behaviours, but original bug affects small percentage of users and the further digging even less than that, idk man ppl that raise issues with bugs usually look for a workaround, not go digging further and claiming the whole thing is useless when probably 100% of sfos users use ambiences to some extent, who knows maybe the bug was in 1.0.0.5 and you’re the only person using ambiences that way, so almost a decade of usage to hit it? Not really completely broken?

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No, definitely not “in this specific scenario” but actually in the typical and intended scenario of using ambiences - precisely what they are meant for: having two (or more) ambiences with different sound settings and switching between them. Which due to this bug causes that sound settings of the former ambience replace (imperceptibly to the user) the sound settings of the latter one. Just switching between ambiences certainly isn’t a “specific” scenario that I “keep pushing” but in fact the typical and intended way of using them.

And given that such an undesired overwriting of sound settings happens on EVERY switch between ambiences (and additionally upon reboot an active ambience loses settings of most of its notifications but calendar and chat), I dare to stubbornly repeat that IN MY OPINION it such a state it makes the whole ambience system broken and completely unreliable.

Kindly let me have and express my own opinion in my own thread under my own bug report. Thank you very much.

Only as long as they don’t switch between ambiences. And when they sooner or later do it, they will be unpleasantly surprised when they miss important calls or don’t wake up for work due to this bug.

What actually is your problem? Unlike you - who hasn’t contributed to this topic in any other way but patronizing me - I did submit the bug report the way it was supposed to be made, made some further tests and provided additional information, took videos and screenshots illustrating the issue, and with the invaluable help of @nephros also a workaround has been given in form of configuring and using profiles instead of ambiences.

Only after all that, and after having additionally discovered that even a simple reboot further breaks ambience sound settings, I dared to write ONE F****NG SENTENCE that IN MY OPINION this currently makes the whole ambience system broken and unreliable. And here come you and scold me, yourself having contributed absolutely nothing to this topic.

Come on, find yourself some more fruitful ways of killing your time.

2 Likes

@flypig, I’ve seen that you confirmed reading (and marking as tracked) most of the other bug reports posted recently. Could you please confirm that this one didn’t go unnoticed and you’re aware of it? IMO, it is a serious issue, affecting the whole ambience system, and potentially resulting (which was the case for me) in missing important phone calls, messages, etc. due to no notifications.

[Off-topic]
I’m a member of the bug coordination team and I’m in charge of forwarding properly written and easily reproducible reports, such as yours. That’s why they get read and tagged correctly by flypig.

For more information, see this thread.
By the way, you’re not alone. It’s a bit annoying to write everywhere to add your bug report. Do not forget, that it won’t be fixed faster if it’s tracked or not by Jolla.
[/Off-topic]

3 Likes

It’s a bit annoying (if I may quote you) to read exaggerations such as these. I did not write “everywhere”, but SOLELY in this very thread (i.e. under the bug report itself) plus a single post in the thread sacrificed to today’s community meeting (which is meant to suggest topics to cover, isn’t it?) that I planned to attend (in order to discuss this issue) but unfortunately couldn’t. Ergo, in total two posts in two threads (out of 12709 existing), i.e. certainly not “everywhere”. Also, I did not expect anyone “to add my bug report” but to only to kindly confirm noticing it.

Thanks for your very thorough but report @wetab73. I’ve created an internal bug report about it and tagged it as “tracked”. This certainly looks like a valid bug, and I’ll do my best to share any updates about it here.

Just to expand on what @pherjung said, I ask the Bug Coordination Team to list no more than 10 bugs per community meeting as otherwise I run out of bandwidth, and they choose the 10 from their backlog at random.

They also do a lot more than just passing the bugs on: they check bugs are clear, well-formatted, reproducible, etc. which is a lot of work. So any support you and others can provide to them is appreciated.

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Don’t know if it is of any importance to bug tracking, but have you created the ambiences using Settings or by writing ambience files in /usr/share/ambience/?

I’m using self-made ambiences to change the ring tone between an ogg-file and no sound without problems. But I have X10.

on Vollaphone and GS290,
4.4.0.64
With ambience created from Gallery and Ringtone/Volume set, the selected audio and volume level persist between ambient switches and reboots.

I did notice that the last ‘custom’ ringtone applies to other ambiences which don’t have any specific ringtone set. Which I found ‘ok’.

This happens not only with ambiences created using ambience settings, but even with the standard ambiences, eg. Water and Fire.

I get exactly the same problem on both my 10 III and the XA2 Ultra (both 4.4.0.68), so this isn’t unique to one specific device or OS setup.

Only my Jolla1 is free from this bug, so it must have been introduced past OS 3.4.