Volume Controllers behave weirdly

[Arbee4ever]

Description
softvol: changes it just for spotify and properly from 0 to 100 (I think), but doesnt show these changes in system volume mixer
alsa: Sets 0 volume to be around 80% actual volume so its very loud when I try to increase the volume from my phone through spotify.
alsa_linear: Properly sets it from 0 to 100, but sets system volume and not just "spotifyd" and resets it to 0 everytime I pause and play
none: Doesnt let me change it from the phone

To Reproduce

1. Install spotifyd
2. try all different volume controllers

Expected behavior
All should show spotifyd's volume on a separate slider in mixer and properly set the volume from 0 to 100

Logs
I can't provide logs for all four controllers

Versions (please complete the following information):

• OS: Fedora 38
• Spotifyd: 0.3.5
• cargo: 1.72.0

[eladyn]

The behaviour you describe for softvol and none is entirely intended, since softvol is doing the volume adjustment within the software and not in the audio server and none is for when you don't want to use volume control at all.

Regarding the other two modes: Do you mean that setting the volume to 0 percent on the phone doesn't mute the audio, but causes spotifyd to play at 80% volume?

I just tried alsa and alsa_linear and they seem indeed to be broken currently. Will have a look at it.

Regarding the system control vs. app volume control: We are using alsa for that and individual app volume controls are a feature that are specific to pulseaudio and other newer sound servers, AFAIK. So such a feature would require some implementation work.
And I would argue that if you're fine with Spotify's volume control only affecting spotifyd's volume, you can just use softvol. (although then the volume doesn't get reported to the audio server, but you can still query and change it via the MPRIS interface, if needed)

Hope, that clears things up?

[ciembor]

I have problems with alsa, 0 is not 0, 100 is too loud. It works better with softvol in my case, but also not perfect (the characteristics of sound level change is probably not a common one).