i have not used pulseaudio for many, many years. in fact – until fairly recently. there were some bugs at the early beginning that pushed me away. later on when i've tried, there were some annoying things like apps, that when started caused pulseaudio to max-out volume, thus trying to blow my head off (i have fairly decent audio setup, connected to my PC).
recently i've re-gave pulseadudio a shot, due to bluetooth-based headeset i wanted to configure dynamically. mostly-static setup of ALSA was no longer viable. it turned out, that with a bit of tuning it worked out all nice.
the key thing about the “volume thingy”, turned out to be just a simple change of default settings in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf – setting:
flat-volumes = no
prevented individual apps from maxing-out all apps volume.
next irritating thing (though not on all my computers) was occasional glitch, when pulseaudio though new device is connected, but then realized that it was actually not the case (WTF, BTW…). the issue was observable as a short, yet annoying pause in audio stream, with a small “blink” on mixer, that for a split-second showed up reconnecting audio streams to the mentioned, non-existing device and then moving it back to where it was. answer to this was in /etc/pulse/default.pa – i had to comment out:
# load-module module-switch-on-port-available
with these tow changes at hand overall experience was really nice. combined with some console tools, namely:
pulsemixerbluetoothctlit all works nice and smooth. finally… :)