[SOLVED]-ish KDE Volume Mixer | Arch Linux Community | Page 1

tacit terrace Aug 9, 2024, 9:05 PM

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Made a recent switch from Windows to Arch on my desktop. However I'm not completely satisfied with the volume mixer in KDE.

Currently using pipewire with wireplumber and the included KDE volume mixer.

When changing the volume in for example firefox or VLC the volume KDE's volume mixer is tied to the volume in the program's slider. On Windows rather than the two sliders being connected they are seperate so one can set the overall volume of the program and then have more precise volume control in app. Is there any way to get this kind of behaviour in KDE? I've tried both the attached widget in the taskbar and KMix and both behave in a similar manner as described.

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KDE Volume Mixer

unborn pine Aug 10, 2024, 8:38 AM

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its a feature actually

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you can override it in firefox with this extension, it will untie the volume in the slider from the website volumes

Audio Equalizer – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download Audio Equalizer for Firefox. Stylish audio equalizer in toolbar popup.

tacit terrace Aug 10, 2024, 10:19 AM

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I understand the mapping is a feature I just personally dislike it, is there any system-wide fix for this? I'll take what I can get but I'd rather be able to disable it than use a browser-specific override as this still impacts other services i use like VLC or Spotify. But still thank you very much for your answer :)

azure blade Aug 10, 2024, 7:18 PM

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Afaik, there are 2 volume mixers on KDE

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@tacit terrace try using the other one, iirc both of them are included in the kde multimedia package

tacit terrace Aug 10, 2024, 8:01 PM

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Tried both plasma-pa and kmix but both behave similarly. Do you know of any desktop environment which doesnt behave in this way? Or is this a pipewire feature? Would honestly consider switching DE if I can fix this that way.

unborn pine Aug 11, 2024, 7:59 AM

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i actually had this happen to me on pulseaudio

tacit terrace Aug 11, 2024, 9:10 AM

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Damn, dont know how to solve this then. But it seems like rather than just changing the program volume it sets the volume for each individual stream. So having multiple videos playing in firefox leads to having to change the volume independently with them all starting at max volume. I'm probably just gonna set the media.default_volume property in firefox's about:config to remedy this but it's a real shame there doesn't seem to be any easy way to 'solve' this outright.

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However this still has the issue that my headphones are very sensitive so I get absolutely no precision in audio volume in the lower ranges. Shame, but this can probably be remedied by playing around with the output volume.

#[SOLVED]-ish KDE Volume Mixer