Audio problems in KDE

[Kevin Kofler]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> When I try to play audio in Amarok, it says that it's falling back to
> internal audio; I'm not sure if that's good or bad,

This one is a Phonon bug. Rather harmless, but annoying. If this doesn't get 
fixed properly very soon, I'll commit some sort of workaround to silence the 
notifications. (In fact, I've been wanting to do that since before F13 got 
released, but got busy with other stuff.)

> however changing the audio volume inside amarok changes the volume level
> on my front channel on the sound card itself, I'd much prefer for it to
> have it's independent volume control like I thought it used to have.

This is PulseAudio's "flat volumes" "feature".
It can be disabled by setting:
flat-volumes = no
in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or ~/.pulse/daemon.conf .

> Also, every time the machine starts up (which is often as I am still
> reacquainting myself) The master volume level on the card is all the
> way down giving me very low volume. I can't find out how to preserve
> the master volume level

This is probably the doing of that same PulseAudio "feature".

> or even change it via KMix. I have to use alsamixer.

See:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KDE_PulseAudio_Integration#Release_Notes
for how to start KMix with the ALSA backend.

        Kevin Kofler