Master volume temporarily lowered while playing system notifications

[Kevin Kofler]

Dave Ulrick wrote:
> It looks like my problem was indeed a pulseAudio feature.  In pavucontrol
> I found a slider for "System Sounds" that was set to 90%.  (I have no idea
> of how it got set that way to begin with; I don't recall ever changing
> volumes in pavucontrol.) Increasing it to 100% eliminated the master
> volume level changes.  Problem solved!

Looks like you're a victim of the PulseAudio "flat volumes" "feature": set:
flat-volumes = "no"
in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to disable it.

Setting all volumes to 100% works around that, but the best solution is 
probably to disable it entirely.

        Kevin Kofler