Comment 14 for bug 411042

I agree... flat volumes are horrible, in terms of user experience.

I managed to blast myself the other day, by turning up Totem's volume (because it was too quiet) ... and oops, now it turned up the sound card, too! BAM! I'm just glad I didn't have headphones on at the time!

Windows (Vista, more specifically) doesn't do that. OS X doesn't do that. Try changing the volume in iTunes on OS X... it doesn't suddenly make the whole sound card louder. In my opinion, this misfeature needs to be disableable from the user interface... and disabled by default.

The way I think of volumes: Sound Card X is at some proportion of its max volume, and app Y is at some proportion of (whatever volume the sound card it set at). Vista works this same way; the default mixer just ofbuscates it a bit. Well-behaved apps don't change the system volume.