Pulseaudio merged volume considered harmful
I’ve been playing with Fedora a bit recently, and it has that pulseaudio merged volume thing that I read about recently. Basically, the volume keys on your laptop move the “main” pulseaudio volume, which is a composite of Master and PCM. Half the “main” range is Master, half is PCM. This is a great idea, theoretically. It gives you twice the volume resolution range, since the volume of those two are additive.
However, in yet another case of pulseaudio fail on common hardware (intel-hda), if *either* Master or PCM goes to zero, the volume output is muted. Thus, if my main volume ever goes below half, there’s no sound. Simple solution: never make either go to zero unless “main” goes to zero.
In other volume problem news, something about Fedora has caused my volume to not be properly saved on reboot. When it comes up, it’s just below half, and therefore muted. When Is start rhythmbox, no sound. Changing the main volume has no effect (maybe it’s the other one that’s muted? beats me). If I open the volume slider in *rhythmbox* (which is most of the way down after boot) the volume suddenly jumps to maximum, and blows my ears out. Fortunately, I know that now, and I take off my earphones before doing this… I can then use the volume keys to lower it to just above half, which is a decent volume. Good think I don’t want it quiet, tho, as that’s not possible without opening the ALSA mixer directly…
So, partial fail to pulseaudio, partial fail to fedora, it seems. If all the fail goes to one, I apologize to the other.
Sound issues aside, Fedora has been fairly decent, on the whole. And, in all honesty, sound has never worked properly for me on anything but Gentoo…
Pulseaudio IS dangerous
I remember pulse audio letting me crank up the volume to 400% once (by accident) in an ubuntu install I was running. If my headphones hadn’t cut out that would have been seriously harmful.
I have hurt my ears by clicking on a track in RB and getting an instant, painful, full volume blast through my headphones. I had set the volume levels in the mixer that comes with the desktop environment (XFCE), but when I click on the track, all my volume settings are completely changed, and the volume is now set to 100%.
I just get annoyed with these stupid sound systems that require you to be a sound engineer to operate your computer. For goodness sake, people, we just want a volume switch on our panel that sets a volume and STAYS THAT WAY. If stupid Windows can do it, why not Linux??? It used to work. Now I don’t understand what is going on or where to begin to sort out the sound problems on my desktop computer.
The XFCE mixer no longer responds to the “Master” volume control (i.e. changing the level on the control no longer changes the volume in any way), although the sound does disappear if I switch that control off. Sound volume NOW changes in accordance with settings of the “Surround” and “PCM” controls, but in a strictly additive way. Why have two volume controls, neither of which seems to be called “Volume” or “Master”? Whenever I start a track in RB (or run Skype) they put the “Surround” and “PCM” sliders to 100% – which is ear-damagingly LOUD. Yes, I can turn them down, but WHY do I have to keep undoing their stupid behaviour? RB used to work.
Sound has just got worse and worse.
Help.
Pulseaudio = FAIL.
after much tweaking i managed to get Jaunty to be useable.
i dont like Gnome much, but even Karmic’s PHONON audio in KDE 4.3 sucked
Why is Linux audio going backwards ?
Pulseaudio has single handedly managed to get only one thing to work consistently – to turn Linux into Windows Me..
but my sound worked in WinME
Pulseaudio is killing Linux.
Mepis 8.01 is still a nice, reliable, fast, .deb distro. props to Warren.
when Mepis goes KDE 4.3 i may cry