Disable PulseAudio flat volumes to prevent it from pushing volume level to max

[kendell clark]

hi
I'm ambivolent on the subject. If flat volumes become a problem, I know
how to turn them off. However, I think because of all the complaints
here by people who have a very good track record and don't complain
often, this seems to bear out what I've been trying to say. That this
should be fixed in pulse audio. I'll stop repeating myself and ask for
where to go from here. Should I file a bug against pulse audio, comment
on the redhat bug previously mentioned here, something else? I want to
get the ball rolling on this. I do know that I've tried a few times to
approach pulse audio devs on their irc channel, to no luck. I rarely get
a response. When I do, it's generally something like a shrug and, not my
problem, go file a bug against the app. Not that everyone's like that,
just saying what my personal experience has been.
Thanks
Kendell clark


On 09/22/2015 05:23 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On Mon, 2015-09-21 at 18:00 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>> There is danger to the ears if an application assumes that 100%
>>> volume
>>> is a safe volume and blindly sets its volume to 100% without user
>>> input. But that only affects that application - one application's
>>> misbehavior never affects another application.
>>
>> That's definitely not correct. With flat volumes, applications can and
>> do set the system volume to 100%. I've received numerous complaints
>> about this. It's particularly frustrating when watching YouTube videos,
>> since YouTube sets the system volume to 1 when starting a video. We are
>> still waiting for some promised "browsers API" in PulseAudio to fix
>> this easily.
>>
>> I think it's telling that this thread is full of complaints about flat
>> volumes, with no supporters. Also, Ubuntu does not seem to be getting
>> any complaints about the lack of flat volumes. :)
> 
> Given that I don't want per-app volumes either, not sure that my opinion
> is required to choose between 2 schemes that are per-app.
>