On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 02:10:44PM +0000, Patrick May wrote: > I've lost count of the number of times Pulseaudio has been responsible for > noise being blasted through my headphones at 100% maximum volume or my > speakers suddenly blasting audio at 100% maximum loudness You may be running into the flat-volumes mis-feature. You can find lots of discussion of this online, for example[1]. Mercifully, it was disabled by default in PulseAudio 14.0[2], which was released late last year. If you're running PulseAudio >= 14, then it's possible you have an older configuration file lingering with flat-volumes still enabled. Most likely that would live in </etc/pulse/daemon.conf> or in <~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf>. If you're on older PulseAudio, you can disable flat-volumes in those same files. If you're certain that flat-volumes is disabled, then I'm not sure what would cause your issue. Possibly some stream volume restoration bug, or misbehaving mixer software? PulseAudio has fairly verbose logging, which may give you a clue as to what is causing your volume to be unexpectedly maxxed out. See the LOGGING section of pulse-daemon.conf(5). [1] https://200ok.ch/posts/2019-05-20_disable_flatvolume_for_pulseaudio.html [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/14.0/#flatvolumesarenowdisabledbydefault Andrew
