PulseAudio popping with multiple sounds in Fedora 22

My transition from Fedora 21 to 22 on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was fairly uneventful even with over 2,400 packages involved in the upgrade. The only problem I dealt with on reboot was that my icons on the GNOME 3 desktop were way too large. That’s a pretty easy problem to fix.

However, something else cropped up after a while. I started listening to music in Chrome and a Pidgin notification sound came through. There was a quiet pop before the Pidgin sound and a loud pop on the end. Thunderbird’s notifications sounded the same. The pops at the end of the sound were sometimes very loud and hurt my ears.

I started running PulseAudio in debug mode within a terminal:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start

There were some messages about buffer underruns and latency issues but they were all very minimal. I loaded up pavucontrol and couldn’t find anything unusual when multiple sounds played. I gave pavumeter a try and found something very interesting.

When Chrome was playing audio, the meters in pavumeter were at 80-90%. That seems to make sense because I keep Chrome as one of the loudest applications on my laptop. My logic there is that I don’t want to get blasted by a notification tone that is drastically louder than my music.

However, if I received a Pidgin or Thunderbird notification while Chrome was playing music, the pavumeter showed the volume levels dropping to 30% or less. As soon as the sound was over, the meters snapped back to 80-90% and there was a big popping sound. I lowered Chrome’s volume so that it showed up at the 30% level in pavumeter and forced a new Pidgin notification sound - the pops were still there.

I started searching in Google and stumbled upon ArchLinux’s PulseAudio documentation. (Their documentation is really awesome.) There’s a mention of the flat-volumes PulseAudio configuration option. If it’s set to no, you get the older ALSA functionality where volumes can be set independently per application. The default is yes and that default comes with a warning in the documentation:

Warning: The default behavior can sometimes be confusing and some applications, unaware of this feature, can set their volume to 100% at startup, potentially blowing your speakers or your ears. To restore the classic (ALSA) behavior set this to no.

As a test, I switched flat-volumes to no in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. I restarted PulseAudio with the new setting:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start

I started music in Chrome and sent myself an IM in Pidgin. No pops! An email came through and Thunderbird and a notification sound played. No pops there, either!

GNOME 3 was a bit unhappy at my PulseAudio tinkering and the volume control disappeared from the menu at the top right. I logged out of my GNOME session and logged back in to find the volume control working again.

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