F12: volume decreases during playing mp3 files with gnome-mplayer

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:15:24 +0100, Joachim wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Having weird effect during playing mp3 files with gnome-mplayer in F12:
> 
> very often, the volume level decreases more and more (simetimes down to 
> 0) during playback of mp3 files, without any manual change of the volume 
> knob.
> 
> Somebody can confirm this behaviour with
> gnome-mplayer-0.9.8-1.fc12.i686 ?

All I can confirm is that it affects lots of other audio/media players,
too. There are many tickets about that assigned to pulseaudio _and_ also
the individual players (such as totem, rhythmbox or audacious) or media
playing backends (such as GStreamer). Where the tickets are still open,
they are easy to find with the http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/SRC-RPM-NAME
web pages - replace SRC-RPM-NAME appropriately, e.g.:
http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/gstreamer-plugins-good

As I understand some of the comments related to this problem, it won't
be fixed in PulseAudio but must be fixed for any app that uses the
PulseAudio API to set the volume.

In Audacious I've fixed it by not resetting the default pulseaudio output
stream volume and being more conservative in storing/reusing volume level
changes, which are made with external volume preferences tools.