GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 613725
Volume linked to system volume greatly magnifies volume changes
Last modified: 2020-03-17 08:59:16 UTC
Banshee's volume now seems to be linked to system volume, but the linkage is very strange. If I have banshee volume @ 5% and system @ 25%, then change banshee to 10%, system changes to 46%, so it gets twice as loud as I wanted (i.e. 4 time instead of 2 times, which is really painful with headphones). If I then change banshee back down to 5%, the system volume doesn't change back. PulseAudio's volume control has a linkage between app volume and system volume, but it's much milder. The system volume seems to change by about half what banshee's volume changes by, and only when it's less than the banshee volume. I get the feeling that banshee is trying to scale the system volume itself, as well as pulse doing so, and the two combine to cause this effect.
This might have something to do with it: commit 29dfe2c474b06e5e2794c7965880476502802638 Author: Arun Raghavan <arun.raghavan@collabora.co.uk> Date: Wed Mar 17 10:41:34 2010 [libbanshee] Make the volume slider smooth with PulseAudio PulseAudio maps linear stream volumes to "actual" volumes as a cubic function. This change reflects that in the volume slider, making it feel more natural. This also makes the slider values correspond to other apps, such as GNOME volume preferences. Ref: https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-May/003898.html
I have version 1.8 in Ubuntu maverick, and there are 3 layers (system volume, banshee volume in system and internal banshee volume), so if I change volume in banshee, volume in sound-preferences is unchanged E.G. Totem has 2 layers, system (not changing), app (changed by totem)
Banshee is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes more than three years ago. Its codebase has been archived. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is being shut down) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/264 for more info.