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
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