https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479209
Niklāvs Koļesņikovs <89q1r1...@relay.firefox.com> changed:
What |Removed |Added
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CC| |89q1r1...@relay.firefox.com
--- Comment #1 from Niklāvs Koļesņikovs <89q1r1...@relay.firefox.com> ---
KMix is for the low level (as well as legacy client) ALSA API and essentially a
KDE GUI version of the alsamixer TUI application.
Meanwhile as the name suggests plasma-pa is the audio control app for the
PulseAudio API (which is nowadays emulated by PipeWire).
To cut a long story short, there's no such thing as a Master volume control in
PulseAudio or PipeWire. And, I think, there's not one even in ALSA, since at
that level you get whatever controls the underlying hardware has (which may or
may not have a Master PCM as part of its audio chip).
The most likely source of the Master volume you see in KMix is, I believe, the
default name for either the old PulseAudio or the newer PipeWire plugin for
ALSA, which show up as its own device. Either plugin will route legacy clients
into the newer audio stack and, IIRC, both have a Master PCM. In PW it's a way
to expose the default sink's volume control to clients which otherwise do not
know about the PA/PW internals and therefore couldn't control the volume of the
actual hardware sink (when using the legacy PA daemon the Master PCM might
behave differently but I'm uncertain).
To sum it up, when using PipeWire, that Master control behaves as if you were
adjusting the default sink such as via the media keys of the keyboard or using
the mouse scroll wheel while hovering over the plasma-pa icon in the tray. If
you expect something else to happen, then perhaps that particular Master PCM
belongs to your audio device rather than the plugin for legacy clients. In
which case it can be controlled via KMIx or alsamixer but it's at a lower audio
stack level than plasma-pa and is not meant to be exposed to clients via PA API
(and probably not via PW API either).
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