Pulseaudio madness: Flat-volumes

[dreamer]

Sorry if this post is a little negative. I was never a fan of Pulseaudio and this is just another example.

MX-17 “suffers” from an upstream issue in Debian. I’m talking about flat-volumes in Pulseaudio. Or is it possible that someone likes this behavior?

AFAIK flat-volumes is disabled in Ubuntu, openSUSE and even Fedora. I don’t know what flat-volumes is good for, but it’s not disabled in Debian/MX Linux.

I noticed that sound didn’t work right when adjusting the volume in VLC changed the master volume. I had read about flat-volumes before when people complained on Reddit that flat-volumes had damaged their hearing.

I found out that it was easy to fix. The file is located in /etc/pulse and is called daemon.conf. There is a line called flat-volumes which has to be uncommented and also changed to “no”.

After that sound works as expected.

Why is flat-volumes dangerous? Because your master volume is your safety level. If you start VLC with 100 % volume then it still won’t exceed your master volume (which may be set to 30 %). But with flat-volumes enabled it will raise your master volume to 100 % and your ears will fall off.

[GuiGuy]

Thanks for that, dreamer.
One of Poettering's bugs is squashable

[kepler1]

Hello!

Can we just have this feature disabled? (in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf)

I see no actual use in having this feature enabled... I think having it off for most of the users is a better choice.

Thanks!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I don’t know what flat-volumes is good for

To give an example: raising the VoIP call volume will raise the hardware volume and adjust the music-player volume so it stays where it was, without having to lower the volume of the music-player manually.

Disclaimer:

Code: Select all

E485:~$ apt policy pulseaudio
pulseaudio:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 12.2-4
  Version table:
     12.2-4 500
        500 https://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
        100 https://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages
E485:~$

Pure ALSA ftw!

Flat volumes can also be disabled via ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf, which will avoid a confusing debconf question if the pulseaudio package is updated.