[pulseaudio-discuss] pavucontrol: Allow volume adjustment of apps that play sounds only briefly

[Arun Raghavan]

On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 18:25 +0100, Julian Sikorski wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> This was originally posted on Red Hat Bugzilla [1]:
> Skype makes sounds when friends log off, log on, and other times.  The
> sounds skype makes are played for only a second.  pavucontrol lists
> skype for that brief period.  This is not enough time to change the
> volume at which skype makes those sounds.  Make this possible.
> 
> Can anything be done about this? TIA.

The GNOME and pavucontrol UIs do actually expose event sound volumes
regardless of whether an event sound is actually playing. Unfortunately,
the Skype folks just tag all their streams as phone streams (even the
event sounds), so that volume does not apply. The only real fix for this
at the moment is to reduce the volume on a Skype call (and yes, this
does suck, but there isn't anything we can do about this).

Tangentially, it might actually be nice to expose a few more roles than
just events (I'm thinking phone and music) in pavucontrol at least. It's
what phone UIs do, and is quite sensible, IMO.

-- Arun