all (audio)players should have the same preset sound volume

[tankdriver]

current: situation in jaunty (&karmic)
rhythmbox: 100%
totem: 50%
vlc: 100%
banshee: 80%
mplayer: 100%
kaffeine: 75% (more or less)
dragonplayer: 100%
amarok: 80%
miro: 100%

please unify the levels.
This will make the whole desktop experience more all of a piece.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

How exactly would this influence user experience?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont (rdenis)]

VLC uses 100% for the nominal volume. There is no bug.

[tankdriver (stoneraider-deactivatedaccount)]

@Harald Sitter:
I will try to explain the main reason why I filed this wish.
For example, a user "wears" in-ear headphones and watches a Video in Totem (50% Volume). The user adjusts the overall Sound Volume with the sound icon in the gnome panel to a relatively high sound level. (e.g. watching a music video, to get a good sound experience)
Then, the user closes totem and plays something with rythmbox (100% Volume) without changing back the overall sound level.
Result: eardrum gone / sense of hearing killed

I know, I am talking about the __default pre-set settings__ and I know that the "real" sound output level depends at a high percentage on the sound level of the file/media which is played back.
At my point of view totem is the main discussion point here. especially because totem and rythmbox are installed by default and there is a huge difference between their default settings. (Or are movies usually less loud as music files?)

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Well, honestly I think this is a rather poinless change for 3 reasons:
a) Different decodes possibly can lead to different volumes (say you use Amarok and VLC, they use different libraries to decode the media files, so 100% might not be what VLC considers 100%).
b) I am no HCI specialist, but my assumption is that a "regular" user (that is someone who might not even know that app volume != system volume) will almost always try to change the volume in the app itself. There they got some icon and a slider indicating that volume can be manipulated here, which makes me believe that they will almost always opt for this way of changing the volume.
c) As you pointed out already. Different files have different levels, so without global replaygain the proposal does not make sense.

c is especially important, because everything stands and falls with this fact. Without replaygain Rythmbox and Totem could both be using 100% by default and yet your hearing will get blasted. On that remark I'd also like to point out that replaygain is constantly eating resources and thus not gonna happen by default anyway :|

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Karmic&Lucid:
Kaffeine: 100%
Dragonplayer: 100%

Now since apparently movies aren't as loud as music (or so the claim ;)) I suppose it makes sense that Amarok comes with 80%. Also in Amarok 2.3 the volume slider is art of its own and looks way better with 80 ;)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Ditto #4 comment

[Mohamed Amine Ilidrissi (ilidrissi.amine)]

Since there is some disagreement over here, I'll mark the remaining projects as Opinion.