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