How to get the Fire Fox volume under control

[Gps2010]

Every time a new vid starts on you tube of facebook the volume jumps to 100%.

I am totally getting fed up wit this, also because I did already complain to Firefox directly.
They dont seem to care one bit.

Proof:

1422637 - Volume does not stay where it is manually set using pulseaudio

Does anybody have a solution, on how I prevent FF from increasing the volume?

What worries me most is Paul Davis reply on the bugzilla, who they also ignore.
He knows a lot more about audio and Linux then me.

Most here wont know Paul, but he wrote and is developing Ardour, a DAW.

To sum it up, how do I stop FF from increasing the volume.

[deano_ferrari]

See if the advice in this thread helps:

How to disable flat-volume setting in pipewire (#1074) · Issues · PipeWire /...

[Gps2010]

I will try and report back.

I am using pulse audio though, but there is this word again. Flat volumes.

You might have set me on the right path:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting_

Volume gets louder every time a new application is started

Per default, it seems as if changing the volume in an application sets the global system volume to that level instead of only affecting the respective application. Applications setting their volume on startup will therefore cause the system volume to “jump”.

Fix this by disabling flat volumes, as demonstrated in the previous section. When Pulse comes back after a few seconds, applications will not alter the global system volume anymore but have their own volume level again.

This does sound like the problem.

[Gps2010]

Also this is interesting:

And reading the next link, this must be what Paul was referring too.

https://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/doxygen/volume.html

With flat volumes enabled, it means the maximum volume that the sound hardware is capable of, which is usually so high that you absolutely must not set sink input volume to 100% unless the the user explicitly requests that (note that usually you shouldn’t set the volume anyway if the user doesn’t explicitly request it, instead, let PulseAudio decide the volume for the sink input). With flat volumes disabled the sink input volume is relative to the sink volume, so 100% sink input volume means that the sink input is played at the current sink volume level. In this case 100% is often a good default volume for a sink input, although you still should let PulseAudio decide the default volume. It is possible to figure out whether flat volume mode is in effect for a given sink.

I am willing to bet FF does not do what pulse audio say they should

[deano_ferrari]

A FF extension like SoundFixer might be worth a shot?

[Gps2010]

Thank you, I installed soundmixer, for now that seems the easiest to try, and it claims to fix my problem at least on you tube.

If I get more desperate, I might try to switch to JACK, but in the past JACK was not what I consider user friendly.

It does make me sad they don’t fix and or extent ALSA, but keep inventing new layers on top of ALSA.

Jack, pulse audio and pipewire all work on top of ALSA.

When I asked about this on the Linux musician forum, the reply I got was that almost nobody knows fully how ALSA works, because the ALSA code is poorly documented. (the guy stating this is writing. music producing plugins for Linux)

I need to win the lottery then hire a few coders who will for starters just fix the poorly documented part of ALSA.

[Gps2010]

First test is positive, volume jumped to 80%, and not to 100% in firefox when starting a new vid.
That is already progress, and I have not even read the manual of soundmixer.

[Gps2010]

I am not saying this solution is perfect (soundmixer) but its a huge step forward.

Now firefox does not seem to attempt to blow up my speakers and headphone anymore.

What I love about it is that I can increase the volume gain per page, better then the default volume control.

So thank you.

[deano_ferrari]

Ok thanks for the feedback.