I’ve been using Linux exclusively for over 10 years but I never really understood how things like ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire work.

As far as I can remember, I’ve used pavucontrol for adjusting my settings.

I’ve noticed that when I’m changing playback volume in Clementine (recently Strawberry, which is its fork) the volume slider in pavucontrol is changing as well – OK, this means they are connected, or even “the same thing”?

But looks like both of them are working with different percentage numbers? How is this possible and what kind of setting/configuration should I look for if I want to change it? Or is it simply a bug in the player? (Both Clementine and Strawberry behave the same way.)

In this particular case, it bugs me because in the way how my audio is set up now (client is forwarding via module-tunnel-sink, server is Raspberry Pi with USB card and speakers connected via 3.5 jack), all acceptable volume levels as shown in the player are under 10%, which makes the player UI slider pretty much unusable. I’d still prefer to use this UI to set the volume, though.

So while I’d like to fix this particular issue, I’d also like to have a better insight in how PW works and eventually have a better strategy of controlling audio volumes from various sources. My current strategy is “once my 4-5 commonly used sources work, don’t ever touch it again and don’t ever play stuff from any unknown (web!) players, lest you and your neighbors are heading for a nasty midnight surprise”, which is a lame strategy.