On Tue, 2015-09-22 at 15:51 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Thu, 17.09.15 20:59, Germano Massullo
(germano.massullo(a)gmail.com)
wrote:
> Today I had a scary experience with the audio of my computer.
> I was listening to music with Amarok, using my headphones... The
> KMix
> volume level was ~ 35%. When I logged into a video conference
> application, the volume suddenly reached the 100%. I was shocked,
> having
> the maximum audio level shooted in your ears is a painful
> experience.
> The conference application that triggered PulseAudio pushing volume
> to
> maximum level probably should have never asked the system for a
> 100%
> audio level, but on the other hand, PulseAudio should never allow
> an
> application to make such sudden changes.
> To avoid that, you have to set
> flat-volumes = no
> in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
This is a non-sensical request. If an app uses the mixer APIs to set
the volume of something to very loud, that's what happens. Flat
volumes have nothing to do with that.
I mean, the app you are using shouldn't set the volume like this, and
that's the key here. If you turn off flat volumes you win about
nothing, you just work around this specific app. Soon the next app
will come along and play the same game with the actual device volume,
and you won *zero*.
Don't mix flat volumes with misbheaving apps. Turning off flat
volumes
is a hack around the broken apps at best, and completely pointless..
For better or worse, misbehaving apps are a reality that is probably
not going to go away... I think we need to have a volume control
approach that is at least somewhat tolerant against such apps and has
some safeguards.