[pulseaudio-discuss] Per-app flat volume adjustment is highly unintuitive, if mathematically consistent.

[Jud Craft]

No, genuinely.  I really assumed that flat-volume was a different way
of presenting the relative volumes, rather than a truly different
method of managing stream volume.

Truthfully, I insist upon my point about Vista.  They may do the same
things on the inside, but in Vista, the only thing that *appears* to
touch the master volume is my volume knob.  I like the metaphor of
master volume, and scaling everything relative to that, so I guess
flat volume isn't for me.



On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>
> Heh, then you don't want the flat vol logic.
>
> But really, *why* do you want this? Why do you want your highest
> stream volume considerably lower than the device volume? That 20%
> headroom is simply something you lose then. Your sound card has a 16
> bit DAC. But that way you use it as 15 bit dac only.
>

But it's not my highest stream.  I don't want music to be the loudest
thing that I play.  I have other things that need to be louder.

It is a shame not having the headroom accessible to my music, but the
truth is, I like to set everything as I know it will be (my music
should be this high, Skype and AIM and system events should be a
little higher than that so I hear everything, Firefox should be lower
than all of them because YouTube wears out my ears), and trust that
they'll stay that way, even as I continue to adjust the master volume
to make them all a little louder or quieter as I need at a particular
time.

Vista does this, and Pulse does it fine in non-flat volume mode.  I
really do find it curious that you say Vista and Pulse operate the
same, because truthfully, even if Vista uses flat-volume style meter
control, the actual behavior of the volumes is not quite the same as
flat-volume-Pulse.  It's truly a little different.

Someday I may very much enjoy Pulse's flat volume mode, but I think it
will require a paradigm shift.  It may just be that I've managed to
use Vista's flat volumes in a certain way that fits my "this should be
that loud, that should be that loud" mentality, and Pulse is either
more- or less-correct in its application of flat volume logic in a way
I didn't expect.


I -did- assume flat- and non-flat were basically the same.  Both let
me scale my app volumes relative to each other.  But with flat volume,
the meters jump all over the place just when I want to make things a
little quieter or louder, and adjusting one program bothers everything
else.  It just doesn't make sense to me yet.

So I guess this is where I end.  Thanks for listening, and I
appreciate your time.  I'll give the virtual volumes thing a read
after a little more supper and see if it makes more sense.