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.
