Every now and then, and always at night (more like early morning) when
I'm going to bed, pulseaudio will cause VLC's volume to go from 50 to
maxed out the second any music starts playing. I have to hover my mouse
over the volume setting so I can take it back to 50 the instant it goes
full blast. This, btw, is in Slackware 15, but I have the same issues on
an old Linux Mint system, and there I was told it was pulseaudio doing
it.

So here's the question: How do I stop it from doing this? I can't
imagine that people like having it do that,so someone surely knows how to
keep it from jacking around with preset volume levels.

So how do you configure it use the existing volume every time, and never
attempt to change it?

Thanks

--
From my days in 16th Special Operations Wing Intelligence:

AN EXERCISE is a situation in which you stop what you're doing
in order to simulate doing what you were doing so you can show
someone else that you can simulate what you were doing as well
as you were doing it before you were interrupted.

Hi, I've not come across this kind of error before this, so please excuse my going around the problem.

If it is pulse audio creating the problem, I suggest moving to pulse-audio's successor

pipewire and wireplumber.

wireplumber is a mulimedia-server, while pipewire takes over from pulse in other areas.

There are some quirks, please search for a tute from your OS first, if you can't find one or two...

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...o/wireplumber/

The olny other thing I can think of is perhaps the mainboard may have some age related degradation.

Ok, then, one final question: How do I completely get rid of pulseaudio?
Is it as simple as "whereis pulseaudio" and remove everything from the
result? Or is there more to it than just that?

Thanks,
--jim

--
From my days in 16th Special Operations Wing Intelligence:

AN EXERCISE is a situation in which you stop what you're doing
in order to simulate doing what you were doing so you can show
someone else that you can simulate what you were doing as well
as you were doing it before you were interrupted.

Hi, you can't get rid of it, it's been integrated(, since no-one complained enough).

But you can reduce it to a minimum.

You will be left with libpulse* but the init scripts will change it behaviour.

I also have alsa configured to fill any other gaps.

I have read that some web-browsers are hard-coded for pulse, but falls back to alsa if pulse can't be found.

I did this process just by removing pulseaudio associated packages untill the deps started impinging on the OS operation. (...until removing more would bork the system)

All the best.

I've also removed pulseaudio as much as possible, and only use ALSA. I'm left with 2 packages, libpulse0 and libpulse-mainloop-glib0.

yep, I got those too.

Those packages are in deep.

do you have sound after the services have been restarted? (like a reboot)

Did pipewire and wireplumber install without errors?

I hope this works for you.

I have these packages for pipewire on my system: libkpipewire5, libkpipewiredmabuf5, libkpipewirerecord5 and libpipewire-0.3-0. I don't have anything for wireplumber. When my system reboots, I have this command run on startup:

You may need to install wireplumber.
and perhaps also install pipewire, if you haven't already done so.

Most of the pulse packages will/would be removed during install of those packages and any dependant packages.

I hope this helps.

Try changing your preference for the default volume in VLC, here:

2 members found this post helpful.

In VLC on my system, the "Always reset audio start level to:" option is set to 100, but is greyed out and not checked.