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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons. I almost never want to quickly slide to a specific volume, it's always "this is a little too loud" or "I didn't quite hear that."

The action I want is a quick relative tick up or down, then listen again to see if the improvement is adequate, then repeat as necessary until it's perfect.

Sliders are good for quickly moving by a large amount to a rough absolute position. But they're utter crap for fine adjustment.

Am I the only one who gets infuriated when trying to get to the exact spot I want by rolling my finger ever so slightly to get a slider to move by half a pixel? It takes forever and it gives you RSI!

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>I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons

Blows my mind how an interface I can operate with my eyes closed on touch alone would ever be considered inferior to one I actually have to engage directly with with and change modes to access sliders.

You can 'flick' the volume or brightness button on the Touch Bar to the left or right to turn down/up respectively. It even works holding down Shift+Option to enable more fine control of either.

> It even works holding down Shift+Option to enable more fine control

So now I need to use two hands and look at the control to use it when the previous worked fine one handed on touch alone.

Fine grained control (+0.1 "dots") still required two hands before I think?

Can be done one handed (opt+shift+vol) but it wasn't needed to fix inaccuracy in the default interface as the post I replied to suggested

I missed Shift+Option fine control and didn't know that. Thank you!

> they're utter crap for fine adjustment

I think if you'd make this suggestion to audio engineers they'd throw their consoles at you

Sorry, I specifically meant touch sliders, not physical sliders, and especially not physical sliders with nicely tuned damped physical resistance like on expensive audio equipment.

> I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons. I almost never want to quickly slide to a specific volume, it's always "this is a little too loud" or "I didn't quite hear that."

Have you actually used the slider to get used to it? It requires a significant-ish slide to increase/decrease a full dot. And by significant-ish I mean it is easy to adjust it less than one dot.

That being said I used to think the same until I got used to it, I slide more than a few dots up and down all the time. I would not want to go back to taptaptaptap.

Sometimes I just want to do a slow fade to set the mood you know...

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