Sound volume problems

[Veeti Paananen]

Hi,

I'm experiencing two annoying problems with the sound volume on my
computer and I was wondering if anybody would have any helpful hints on
solving them.

First off, every once in a while the master volume seems to reset to a
point where all sound output is clipping and distorted. Simply moving
the volume slider in the taskbar a bit below and back to 100% fixes this
but it keeps happening. I've also tried to fix the volume using
alsamixer and then use alsactl to store the new settings, but that
hasn't helped.

Second, the output volume of certain applications also seems to drop to
a lower level than others randomly. I've noticed this happening to Flash
player from Chrome and VLC but I'm not sure if it's exclusive to them.

This is occurring with both the internal soundcard (snd_hda_codec) and
another internal soundcard (snd_ca0106), so I doubt it's a
hardware/driver-specific problem.

Thanks,

-- 
Veeti P. - PulseAudio is OK