pulseaudio keeps maxing out volume w/o permission

[spooky130u]

How do I configure pulseaudio to use the volume levels I set, no exceptions, no changing them on its own...ever...?

It's incredibly annoying when I have some symphonic metal going for background music, while trying to get some work done here at home (I work from home), and the next thing I know, the levels in pulseaudio volume control for qmms have just changed (on its own) from about 40% to maxed out. That is completely UNSAT and just flat out wrong. How do I convince pulseaudio that it will NEVER do that again? That it will leave the levels I set and use them as is...no exceptions?

Thanks

[MrEen]

Hi spooky130u.

This is an issue I've seen occasionally and I'm not sure I've seen a concrete answer/solution.

The first thing I would do is install and PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) and use that to set the volume at least once. For some reason, that often works better than default sound settings apps at making settings "stick".

Also, deleting the files in ~/.config/pulse then running pulseaudio -k in the terminal will refresh PA's config files in case the those are causing the issue. Specifically, the file xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-stream-volumes.tdb could be the culprit.

Some people have implemented audio normalization steps as well. This post by rene might be something worth considering.

One thought that just popped into my mind; Do you have System Sounds enabled? If so, they might be set at a higher volume so when they fire the main volume increases, but doesn't return to normal when they end. Their volume can be adjusted on the Playback tab of pavucontrol.

I hope something there is of some help.

[MrEen]

One more idea if none of the above helped. The file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf contains this line:

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flat-volumes = no

Changing that to yes might help.

[spooky130u]

I'll try to get all of this in one post.

First, which pulse audio volume control? I have two on my system---I use the one that has an icon that looks kind of like a speaker. Is the other one better?

Second, as for normalizing volume, I had that working (don't know why it suddenly started working), then something in the boot manager for my system got corrupted, and I had to do a full re-install. That ended that. But it's not a normalization issue, anyways. That's for cases where one mp3 (or ogg, flac, whatever) is recorded at one level, and the next is at a much, much higher level, so if you adjust for one, the next is either too quiet or blasting out your neighbors.

Finally, I just checked /etc/pulse/daemon.conf ... flat-volumes is already set to yes.

Everything was working until recently (since the re-install) pulse audio just decided on its own that it was going to be an ass. I don't really know how else to put it. (Obviously, it didn't "decide" ... but that's how it feels.) With the exception of the brief period where it was all working (before the re-install---still the same config files, totally different results), pulse audio has been nothing but a major PITA from the day I installed Linux Mint. I would really prefer to have a simple audio setup where each app has its own volume control, and there is one overall system volume setting. And that would support the USB audio device I have to use since the speaker output on this system is dead (can't complain much, though---my doctor gave me this laptop when my old Mac Mini died and I was faced with running my home "business" from my cellphone). And to think I was going to install Linux on the Mac Mini shortly before that all happened (I'm used to BSD 4.2 Unix, not Apple's butchered concept of what it wants to call Unix, which hardly even qualifies as Unix-ish IMNSHO). Oh, and a graphic equalizer...the speakers I use have, as the main component, a sub-woofer, which is ok if I were in a house, but has to be toned down in a duplex.

Thanks

Here's my ~/.config/pulse/.... or not, it seems to have vanished. Fortunately, I backup my system regularly (full backup on Monday mornings at 0230 by removing the old and doing a full backup with find, grep, and cpio grep to avoid backing up cache data, etc., and cpio to keep file dates, etc.), and an incremental (where cpio skips newer or same existing files) all other mornings at 0230. I'll see if it's fixed, and if it doesn't misbehave over the next 24 hours, and if I remember to (thanks to my first cancer, my memory is not always great), I'll post a summary here tomorrow. Oh, and I back up on two cloud storage accounts (used to do three plus a 2TB drive, but the drive ate itself (I think there's something inherently wrong with 2 TB drives---I had one using Mac's high speed port and one on linux using USB, and both, after a few months, just quit...different brands for different system hardware, connection types, etc., same exact timing and sudden death), and the other, pcloud, caches everything on my hard drive ... really useful if the hard drive fails before it finishes moving the data. Two isn't enoug, but it's all I have for now. But then, no amount of backups is enough---Murphy's Law of backups sees to that...been there, done that. I ended up with a demo (and source to compile it on their system) of the network planning/disaster recovery simulation software I'd written, that I'd done for another group a few months before, which, fortunately, they still had). I had so many layers of backups spread out in multiple locations and states. All failed at the same time for different reasons...except the one downstairs in Network Control...the one that saved my backside (i.e., my job).

Thanks

[MrEen]

Well, if everything was fine before reinstalling, but broken afterwards, maybe reinstalling the sound base might fix this:

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apt install --reinstall alsa-base alsa-utils pulseaudio linux-sound-base libasound2

PulseAudio Volume Control is what pops up if you run pavucontrol in the terminal, which will obviously tell you if it's not installed. On my 18.3 Xfce, that's what opens from the icon in the panel when selecting Sound Settings... there, but I believe MATE and Cinnamon use there own Sound Settings instead of pavucontrol.

[spooky130u]

I'm using the one with the same icon as the Sound section in the main settings app.

And, I found (in my ~/systems directory) a backup of the configuation when it was all working ... one I'd forgotten I had.
Things are a LOT better now. Normalization is even working. I was going to post a copy of the config file as it is right
now, after tweaking some levels a bit, but it seems that while pulse audio is running, the config file must go away. It's
missing again. Strange. If you get the impression that I don't like pulse audio, go with that. Anyways, it Seems
to be working fine again. I'm going to go ahead and mark this solved. If pulse audio decides to tell me I'm wrong, I'll start a new thread.

Thanks!

[MrEen]

I too hope it stays fixed! And nice work finding something that helped!