Jonathan Joseph Chiarella:
> On 01/20/2016 06:30 AM, sajolida wrote:
>> I'm still in the process of understanding the problem here, sorry...
>>
>> In Tails, when I set the master volume from the system menu to 25% and
>> play an MP3 with Totem (the default media player), raising the volume of
>> Totem to 100% doesn't change my master volume. The volume of Totem is
>> relative to the master volume.
>>
>> The same applies to YouTube from Tor Browser and Audacity and seems to
>> not reproduce what you're saying about media players having the power to
>> maximize the master volume and become dangerous.
>>
>> Now, if I install Audacious in Tails and plays an MP3 with it, then
>> raising the volume of Audacious to 100% brings my master volume to 100%.
>> I guess that's what you're talking about.
>>
>> So my conclusion for now is that, with the flat-volumes on, PulseAudio
>> allows applications to misbehave (= "blow your ears") but that well
>> configured applications, like Totem, Tor Browser, and Audacity don't
>> present this dangerous behavior.
>>
>> If I'm right until now, then I think that we should check whether all
>> applications included in Tails respects the master volume and fix it if
>> we find some that don't.
>>
>> While doing my research I also found that this seems to be a hot debate
>> on Internet, but at the same time, I was surprised to found little
>> information about it on the PulseAudio bug tracker. If this is such a
>> controversial behavior, I guess PulseAudio also have a strong opinion
>> about it themselves. But I could find it, apart from this
>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57355#c2.
>
> I am shocked to hear Totem's volume is relative to the master volume. I
> loathe most Gnome software and use stuff like VLC, so I did not test
> with Totem.
>
> Are you running GStreamer 0.10?
I'm not going to investigate this myself any further. I checked again
and I confirm the behavior that I described in my previous email: Totem
alone is not able to override the master volume and blow your ears. The
same applies to Audacity and Tor Browser which I believe are the
applications most likely to produce sound in Tails.
As said earlier, the only thing I would be interested in right now would
be if you could find an application included in Tails which doesn't
respect the master volume. Then we should fix this. But I'm not going to
do anymore research or tests myself.
Because I don't want to spend time solving theoretical problems or
building up solution that don't match real-life problems.
