[pulseaudio-discuss] Stream volumes as the universal volume adjustment method

[Mads Kiilerich]

Tanu Kaskinen wrote, On 01/07/2010 05:30 PM:
> I have recently formed a belief that in the vast majority of cases where
> the user wants to tweak the volume, the best choice is to tweak the
> stream volume, as opposed to the device volume.
>
> Device volume changing makes usually sense only when the listening
> context changes in some way: if there's some temporary background noise
> in your environment, you may want to turn the global volume up, or if
> there are other people in the same room, you may want to turn the global
> volume down not to annoy them too much. The problem is that you have to
> consistently use the device volume whenever the context changes. If you
> sometimes use the device volume and sometimes the stream volume,
> pulseaudio loses track of what you want and applications will often have
> the wrong volume when they start up (I hope you understand without
> further explanation why that happens). And I think it's very probable
> that you don't remember to always use the device volume when you should.
> The solution is to ignore the device volume and always change stream
> volumes.
>    

FWIW I would make the opposite conclusion. The listening condition often 
changes, and thus I often and quickly want to adjust the volume of all 
streams. The relative volume of the streams is adjusted once 
(attenuated) to match my preferences, and after that I don't need to 
make further changes.

My solution is to ignore the stream volumes and always change the device 
volume.

> Now, when the listening context changes, using the stream volumes has
> its problems too: if you need many programs that use sound, you will
> have change their volumes separately. But I believe that usually the
> context change is temporary, and there is some "main context" where most
> of the programs are used. In the temporary context only one or few
> programs are needed for the duration of the context, so changing one
> stream volume is usually enough.
>
> When adopting the "stream volume only" approach to volume control, using
> the simple hardware controls (+vol and -vol buttons on a laptop, or a
> volume dial on a multimedia keyboard) becomes more useful, because they
> pretty much always do the right thing - change the volume of the
> currently playing application(s), and nothing else.

So if I adjust the volume with one application playing and then start 
another application then the other application will use its default 
volume and the relative volume will thus have changed?

/Mads