Volume in Linux Applications
 

Hi. I run Gentoo 2.6.16 on an amd 64.

I have xmms 1.2.10 and mplayer 1.0. When I'm using both applications at the same time the audio volumes are connected. This means that if I turn the volume for mplayer down, the volume for xmms decreases also. This is of course annoying. I'm using the kernel alsa drivers. Can anyone explain how that handles volume? Is there a way that I can set the volume of various applications independently? I've always thought it would be nice to have a volume control application that would allow the user to change the volume for each process that was accessing the sound card, but I think that just being able to change the volume seperately here would be good.

Thanks.

Ya I did a bit of looking on this a while ago and as far as I could tell, volumes are always system-wide. There no way that I know of to change that.

I think KDE 4 will have the feature that you are looking for, through a new multimedia engine called Phonon. At the moment though, changing the volume in one app will affect another.

Alright, then. Let this be a challenge to the devs. You all crow about how much better Linux is than Windows. Well, this is one aspect where Windows beats the pants off Linux/Gnome/KDE. Let's see what you can do.

Try setting an option in each application that is something like "use software mixer", I know it exists in both XMMS and gmplayer. That should do what you want, at the moment the volume sliders are just controlling the system-wide Master control but if you tell each app to do so, it'll use an internal volume control.

As far as I know, it's the same in Linux and Windows. You can't set volume separately for each application, but you have various "channels", so you can change volume separately for example for applications, audio CDs and microphone.

Unfortunately, XMMS and MPlayer are accessing the same "channel". It could solve your problem if you could somehow change that, but I doubt it is possible :(

I have another problem, or is it a feature. xmms quits if the system is unattended for a while, and the screen saver starts. Is there a way to separate screensaver activity from xmms execution? And yes the volume is global.