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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I try to use non-PCs like I use a PC I run smack into one brick wall or another.

Let me give you an example. I wanted to relax while playing a game and listening to a podcast. My phone has plenty of horsepower for doing both. Oopsie, there's a problem. I can't hear my podcast over the game,and android has no way of setting the volume of different apps to different levels unless the app includes its own internal volume control.

Mobile devices are littered top to bottom with this sort of "I can run but not walk" horseshit.

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You just need to choose the right phone. This works fine on iOS, especially if the game offers in app audio volume selection, although some games deliberately block other audio sources. It’s a per game issue though, not a limitation of the system.

The fact that this requires in-app volume controls, or that an app can block other audio sources, feels like a limitation of the system.

>or that an app can block other audio sources

I think that's a useful feature, and the real issue is that it can't be overridden or reconfigured.

What desktop OS provides per application volume controls, outside the apps?

Both Windows and Linux (via PulseAudio) provide this. I'm not as familiar with the Windows side of things, but on Linux I can also redirect each application's sound to different audio devices.

Yup, this is extra useful when I'm using e.g. an external USB headset for calls. I can have media played through my speakers while using the headset for calls, regardless of whether or not the application supports this itself. (Admittedly VoIP applications generally do.)

Windows does out of the box. Linux and OSX can definitely be configured to even if its not built in. On mobile, you cannot configure or add OS level features the way you can with desktops - at least without jailbreaking.

Linux distributions released in last 10 years or so come with pulseaudio, which does exactly that out of the box. No need for any configuring.

Depending on the DE it might not be exposed to the user at that level of granularity despite being supported under the hood. You need a shell plugin to expose per-app volume controls in Gnome for example. (You can always install pavucontrol, of course.)

Plasma provides it right out of the box.

That's literally a limitation of the system. Actual operating systems like Windows and Mac OS control program volume independently of what the programs internal volume is set to.

Can Windows or macOS do that either?

It looks like there might be some third party options for this, which is maybe your point, but it's not a particularly common use case as far as I can tell.

Windows can, and so can Linux. (I make use of it fairly often when I'm e.g. playing a game and using an external voice chat program.)

macOS cannot without third-party tools, as far as I can tell.

Yes. Out of the box, and for multiple decades now. Controlling how loud your programs are is as basic a function as controlling where they are on your screen.

Interesting. It's a function I've never seen or used. I guess because most software that I would want to do that with provides its own volume controls. Definitely useful.

Most of them do, sure, but why bother with remembering where everything keeps its volume setting when you have one central icon that lets you balance the entire system at once, right on the taskbar?

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