Low rip and CD playback volume with PulseAudio

I'm running Grip 3.2.0 on Fedora 12 with KDE 4.4.  My ripper is standalone 
cdparanoia (/usr/bin/cdparanoia) and my encoder is oggenc.

I've noticed that since Fedora went to PulseAudio that the volume of the 
rips I've made is dramatically lower compared with the rips I made without 
PulseAudio.  Even with Grip's volume slider set to maximum, the ogg files 
I've created while PulseAudio is running are noticably less loud than my 
earlier ogg files.  CD playback from Grip's built-in CD player is likewise 
lower in volume than without PulseAudio in the picture.  The volume 
differential is so great that there's just no way (short of increasing the 
.WAV volume with 'sox'[1]) to generate oggs that match the volume of the 
thousands of oggs I've previously created.

So far I'm inclined to suspect that the problem is the typical "PulseAudio 
doesn't play nice with non-PulseAudio apps" problem.  When I open the 
PulseAudio volume control, the level meter stays at 0% when I'm playing a 
CD track with Grip.  I'd consider ditching PulseAudio entirely, but I'm 
not 100% sure how I could still get "new mail" alerts, etc., from my KDE 
apps if I use plain ALSA sound.

I'm curious if anyone here has noticed this behavior and, if so, what you 
may have done to work around it?

Thanks,
Dave


[1]  I'd rather not resort to this trick since, in my experience, 
increasing the WAV volume with 'sox' makes it difficult to normalize the 
volumes of tracks with tweaked vs. untweaked volumes.

-- 
Dave Ulrick
Email: [email protected]

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