Add an option to constantly monitor the microphone w/o xmitting to vent

[x87bliss]

I use Mangler with a Bluetooth headset. The issue is that if the headset is not transmitting audio data for about 1 second, it goes into standby mode.

It automatically wakes up again the next time someone talks, or if I hit my transmit button. However, the issue is that it takes it a few seconds to wake up, so I often miss short commands from others.

Currently I workaround this issue by opening Ubuntu's Sound Preferences and have that constantly monitor the headset's microphone - forcing it to never go into standby mode. However, it'd be much simpler if there was a way I could do this in Mangler itself.

[x87bliss]

I attached a patch that I made quickly using SVN r799. This patch addresses my problem in a different manner that others may find useful.

It has 3 main changes:

First, it lets the PTT Key override the Voice Activation Threshold. So when Voice Activation is enabled and the Transmit button is toggled on, the PTT Key can still work to start transmits.

Second, if a transmit was starting using the PTT key, it will stop the transmit without waiting for the silence duration once the PTT key is released. However, if the current audio level is about the Voice Activation Threshold, Mangler will still wait for the silence duration before stopping the transmit.

Third, I added a small convenience feature that if Voice Activation is enabled, it will automatically toggle on the Transmit button when you successfully connect to a server.

I use this with the Voice Activation Threshold set to 100%, essentially disabling Voice Activation. However, I still have a VU meter that always works, and most importantly my Bluetooth headset doesn't constantly go in and out of sleep mode during raids. If at some point I wanted to use Voice Activation too, I would just have to set the Threshold to a proper level.

Note that this patch has only been tested with SVN r799.

[ekilfoil]

Thanks for the patch. It doesn't seem to address the mouse PTT. Can you add that and update the patch?

[x87bliss]

Enable PTT Key and Mouse to override Voice Activation Threshold

[x87bliss]

I updated the patch. This time it's patched and tested against r800.

It still works the same as it did before, except now both the PTT Key and Mouse PTT can be used to override the Voice Activation Threshold.

[ekilfoil]

The PTT override is a good idea, and your usage of it is clever. We need a better solution for the VA perm-transmit though (auto-pressing the transmit button is a bit of a hack), and we'll figure that out before 1.2.0 is released.

[ekilfoil]

this is done in r906