Master volume temporarily lowered while playing system notifications

[Dave Ulrick]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Dave Ulrick wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The other night, a 'yum update' updated my FC11 system to KDE 4.3.5.
> I've noticed a rather annoying little change:  while a KDE system
> notification is being played, the master volume is temporarily lowered.
> (If KMix is open I can see the Master Volume slider move down and back up
> as the sound plays.)  This means that if I have the volume adjusted to a
> comfortable level for music listening that I can barely hear the sound
> that alerts me to new mail.
>
> Although I suppose some folks might like to have new mail alerts, etc.,
> played a bit quieter while they're playing music, I'm of the opinion that
> I'd like alerts to be audible over the music so I can hear and act on the
> alert.  Before the upgrade to 4.3.5 I used to be able to hear the
> notification sounds quite well.  Is this a bug or feature?  If the latter,
> is there any way for me to switch things back to the old behavior?

A few additional details:

1.  The problem occurs when "Use the KDE Sound System" is selected in the 
Player Settings tab under Notifications settings.  (I have the volume 
slider set to 100%.)

2.  I can work around the problem by selecting an external player in that 
tab.  That way, notifications play with no master volume reduction.

3.  My KDE release:

$ rpm -q kdebase:
kdebase-4.3.5-3.fc11.i586

4.  My sound card is identified as a Ensoniq AudioPCI in KMix.  PulseAudio 
is installed and running.

5.  From '# lspci -v':

02:02.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880B [AudioPCI] (rev 02)
         Subsystem: Ensoniq Creative Sound Blaster AudioPCI128
         Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 19
         I/O ports at a400 [size=64]
         Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1
         Kernel driver in use: ENS1371
         Kernel modules: snd-ens1371

Dave
-- 
Dave Ulrick
Email: d-ulrick at comcast.net