flat-volumes in pulse

[voidlike]

I switched to pulse for the ability to have different audio streams at different volumes.

Is it just me or is the way it automatically handles program initial volumes just terrible whether you use flat-volumes or not?

flat-volumes seems like a good option at first since all programs will be at the same volume when started unless you manually decouple them. The problem is however that apparently applications can influence the master volume since it sets it to the loudest application which can be bad if that application is at 100%.

Without flat-volumes the starting volume values in applications slowly drift apart over time, and after a month or so I'll find that youtube is extremely quiet, for example, with the player being at max volume and pressing my increase volume hotkeys does nothing. I have to manually open pavucontrol and turn the volume up again.

Have the people designing pulse seriously never thought of just having a master volume that is uninfluenced by the applications themselves, and every application starts with the same initial value as the master, which you can manually decouple if you wish (but restarting the program will again put it to the master value).
It seems like such an obvious solution I'm thinking there has to be some technical reason it doesn't work this way.

Does anyone have some advice, workaround, or explanation for why pulse decides to handle things in such unintuitive ways?

[Ant P.]

The youtube problem is youtube's fault; they've started doing something stupid with their audio encoding lately and all videos are becoming way too quiet.

I don't trust Pulseaudio's volume controls at all, I turn flat-volumes off and have it manually load module-alsa-sink so it can't screw with my hardware volume directly. I have the keyboard volume keys bound to amixer instead. This setup has given me no problems.

[The Main Man]

It's not just you, that's how it is in Linux.
Luckily there is a solution, emerge this package :