I appreciate the above sentence may not make much sense Allow me to explain. There are generally three levels of volume restoration. One is at the alsa level. When the machine is shut down or booted, the system-wide sound volumes are saved or restored respectively. These days (i.e. with newer GDM) this will only matter once – i.e. the very first boot of a fresh install. As GDM starts up it also starts a pulseaudio daemon for the pseudo session started for the GDM login prompt. This will internally save and restore device volumes, so it has inherited the system-wide volumes on the very first use, but thereafter it will have it’s own copy. The third level of restoration is when a real user logs in. This user will get their own PA daemon and will again inherit the value currently set on very first login by that user, but thereafter remember the values set.

So it seems that in your case something somewhere is setting the volume very high. The confusing part is that because PA will save and restore the volumes itself, it shouldn’t really matter if the initial (i.e. at boot) volume is totally insane as once the user logs in their save settings from PA should override it. To be honest it sounds like module-stream-restore is simply not loaded into your PA setup, but I presume that is not the case.

Regardless, I recommend you open a Fedora or Mdv bug report about this. Turn on all logging in daemon.conf and post the relevant sections of your syslog to the bug report. Make sure you demonstrate the problem and if possible annotate your log with a few “I logged in here”, “I logged out here” style comments.

Cheers.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by pulseaudio: KDE PulseAudio mixer integration http://tr.im/JzZQ \o/ (by Colin)…