Comment 10 for bug 653446

Thanks for the video. I'm not really sure what can be done about that however. pavucontrol itself behaves a similar way when using the mouse wheel. The kmix mousewheel slider integration (as with the keys on multimedia keyboards and laptops etc) are designed to give a nice, simple interface to volume adjustment. As soon as you break the "simple" controls (e.g. by controlling left and right channels independently), then that's the price to pay.

There are several different modes of operation here that would support a "fix" anyway. Keep the relative balance stored somehow, and "compress" the ratio as it gets to the upper limits and reinstate it when the volume is reduced sufficiently to allow it again is one method. Blocking any further volume increases is another.

I could do the latter in kmix itself probably (although I'm not certain of this as the decisions on the could actually be further up the kmix stack - can't remember off hand). The former would really have to be done in PA itself (doing "intelligent" volume handling as the PA client application level has a very nasty habit of creating "feedback loops" - the same thing happened with the initial Gnome volume control applet). But even if the first suggestion above was acceptable, the question of precisely what upper limit is presented also comes into play. At the moment, I only expose the 100% aka 0dB point in Kmix but there are people who want to expose up to ~150% (~+11dB). This is software amplification territory. The principles of how to present this are tricky but it's certainly the case that some users need this kind of extra boost. The way it's handled in gnome is inconsistent (the main application allowing up to 150% and the applet capped at 100% - presenting these concepts to the user is trick to say the least).

So I suspect that the first solution is the desired one, but with the added issues of upper bounds capping, the problem does get harder.

I'll certainly discuss the problem upstream and see if there is a general consensus on the issues involved.