Volume controls: too complicated for a simple user

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Andre Tann wrote:

>I'm running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS with KDE.
>
>Right beside the clock, I have a speaker symbol, and I can leftclick
>on it, or rightclick, then chose set up audio devices.
>
>Whichever I chose, I find loads of complicated and contradictory (in
>my eyes) options and settings. Sometimes I have to play around with
>these for minutes until I can hear something coming out of my
>laptop's speaker.

I feel your pain. If it's any comfort, I suffer in my own way over
here because my sound situation is far from ideal. I used the headset
jack to plug my speakers in on my desktop computer because it's the
only way I can get sound.

>Sometimes I tried to middle click on the speaker symbol in order to 
>completely mute everything. But while it shows a crossed symbol, 
>sometimes I still have sound from some applications. So the mute
>logic does not work for all sources or for all sinks. And I cannot
>understand how all this works together.

I use Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu, but I'm going to guess that they
work the same way. If you use the little speaker icon to mute the
sound, I believe it only mutes the sound in the active window, so if
you have sound on elsewhere, you'd have to mute that sound separately.

>Or sometimes I turn up the volume to the maximum by using the mouse 
>wheel over the speaker symbol, and I see the slider is at 150%, but 
>still the music is playing very quiet. So I have to find another
>slider to turn up the volume.

I adjust that with the volume knob on one of my speakers, but you
mentioned yours is a laptop, so it probably doesn't have such a
control. If I left-click my little speaker icon, there's a "Raise
maximum volume" checkbox in the bottom left corner. It looks like
it's in Settings --> Sound --> Over-Amplification in Ubuntu. It may
or may not help, but it also comes with a warning that turning it up
can cause distortion.

>My questions are:
>
>- can anyone recommend a page that explains how to understand all
>these settings and how they work together

This page may be of some use:

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/media.html.en#sound

>- is there a simple tool that lets me control the overall volume,
>and not many volume controls for many audio sinks and many
>applications

I'm not sure if you can do the same thing in Ubuntu as I do in
Kubuntu, but to control the overall volume while sound is on, I hover
my mouse over the little speaker icon in the tray and roll the mouse
wheel.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.