Extremely niche content warning!
I had a problem with the Zoom videoconferencing software (that is mostly excellent and I use it all the time talking to clients): whenever I joined a call, it would reset my system volume to 100% which would then deafen me with the “bingbong!” noise that announces you’ve joined a conference.
I’m using Zoom on Linux. Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS in fact, but with PulseAudio bridged to Jackd because I use a bunch of audio stuff and wanted the more robust controls of Jack for source-to-sink mapping. This makes my bug really niche.
Googling had failed me for ages until I chanced upon this article that talks about PulseAudio and something called flat volumes.
Flat Volumes Is The Culprit
$ pacmd list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <jack_out> driver: <module-jack-sink.c> flags: DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY FLAT_VOLUME state: RUNNING
Oh no! FLAT_VOLUME
is enabled. We need to fix that.
The culprit was Cadence/Claudia that I use to control Jack. It was creating a ~/.pulse/daemon.conf
file that didn’t contain a line saying
flat-volumes = no
which is present in the system-wide /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.
A per-user config file for PulseAudio overrides any system-wide file completely so PulseAudio wasn’t picking up the flat_volumes=no
setting from the main config file. Argh!
The Fix
Super simple. Just add flat-volumes=no
to ~/.pulse/daemon.conf
and restart PulseAudio:
$ pulseaudio -k
And if your PulseAudio isn’t set to auto-respawn, use
$ pulseaudio --start
or start it from Cadence.
I just wanted to say thank you!
I had the exact same issue and thanks to you, my ears may be able to survive many more of those boring meetings! Thanks!!
You’re welcome! I was so pleased when I was able to fix it. It’d been driving me mad.