Re: Low rip and CD playback volume with PulseAudio

On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 09:59 -0500, Dave Ulrick wrote:
[snip]

> 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?

PulseAudio offers a lot of controls for both input and output volumes,
and you can control these at both the hardware level *and* for the
application level.  I've noticed that fresh Ubuntu/Debian installs using
PulseAudio have default settings that make some playback apps nearly
inaudible.  There are also several different applets you have to load to
find all of these new controls.  You can click on the speaker icon to
launch the volume control, but right-click/preferences gets you to
another set of controls.  Then you've got the menu item
System/Preferences/Sound that gets yet a third view, which I find most
useful.  (I'm looking at Ubuntu 9.04, YMMV.)

I doubt the problem is grip at all, but just PulseAudio's default
settings, which aren't all visible in one place. :p



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