Upstream /etc/pulse/daemon.conf has option "flat-volumes" enabled. This setting allows misbehaving or buggy pulse-audio enabled programs to set volume to maximum. This doesn't seem like a sane default to me. Consider patching default config with "flat-volumes = no". As far as I know, at least Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Fedora and Arch Linux do so. Here's a bug in RedHat's bugtracker with some more info on this issue: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267
It sure is among top recurring issues in kde irc channels, but seems to have declined since the mentioned distros switched default.
This occured to me a couple of times as well, I'll try to consider this on next bump.
I have some studio monitors (= volume knobs typically at the back) connected to my PC. The flat volume option has caused me to fall off my chair a few times now. Offenders are 'Musique' (popular audio player, starts at 100%), 'Dolphin' (yep, the dolphin file manager, has no volume control, plays at 100%) and basically any video game. From my PoV, the flat volume option is implemented wrongly in upstream, too, since rather than make all applications absolute volumes (like Windows Vista from which the tried to copy the behaviour), it seems to revert to non-flat-volume behaviour as soon as two audio sources are present.
I nearly fell off my chair a few times because of this. I'm using KDE and have volume set to around 15%. When a notification shows up it sets its volume to 100%, which is then mirrored in all other output streams. This feature coupled with headphones and music playing in the background tend to create extremely painful experiences, and it is not immediately obvious that the issue comes from PulseAudio when it happens only with certain programs, in particular KDE's notifications. From what I understand the initial goal of this feature was to avoid confusion with with non-tech savvy users and to get a seemingly consistent volume slider across all applications. I believe people using Gentoo are capable people who do not get confused by volume sliders. A proper implementation of this feature would force the system volume onto an application upon launch rather than the opposite, but since we are not in charge of PA's developpment I request this feature be turned off as soon as possible in Gentoo's package of PA.
Any update here?
The bug has been referenced in the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=02ec89fdd26b67f56ecce2d0747e4653e27db47b commit 02ec89fdd26b67f56ecce2d0747e4653e27db47b Author: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2018-05-28 22:24:32 +0000 Commit: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2018-06-02 17:06:38 +0000 media-sound/pulseaudio: Set flat-volumes=no by default Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/627894 Package-Manager: Portage-2.3.40, Repoman-2.3.9 .../pulseaudio-11.1-disable-flat-volumes.patch | 48 ++++++++++++++++++++++ media-sound/pulseaudio/pulseaudio-11.1-r1.ebuild | 1 + 2 files changed, 49 insertions(+)
11.1-r1 has the change, is being stabilized (done on most) and all current future ~arch revisions have it too, so I guess this is done here..
Two years later, is this something we should reconsider? Are other downstreams still shipping this too?
At some point it was disabled in upstream side: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/commit/ba73faa4c05717d74fbfd17e8175731e60d8841d https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/691
