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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 08.01.10 01:02, Mads Kiilerich (mads at kiilerich.com) wrote:

> 
> 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.

While I wouldn't do things this extreme, I tend to lean to this side
too: device volume matters more than stream volume.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4