Audio volume jumps to 100% by itself

I have an issue where the audio volume jumps to 100%. It happens reliably when:

  • spotify goes from one song to the next
  • when I click “l” to jump forward 10 sec while watching a youtube video

But it also happens (seemingly) randomly at other times.

Here’s a video demonstrating what happens with the volume when I jump 10sec forward in a video: https://youtu.be/Ai5zu8aR3I8

Relevant part of configuration.nix:

  # Enable sound.
  sound.enable = true;
  hardware.pulseaudio.enable = true;

Some other debug info that may help for someone with a better grasp of this than myself:

[nix-shell:~]$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family HD Audio Controller (rev 31)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GL High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 11: HDMI 5 [HDMI 5]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Headset [Logitech G930 Headset], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Any help to pinpoint the issue here would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I saw a similar thread recently, in which switching to pipewire was suggested in general, which solved the issue there. I had a similar problem with my volume resetting to 100% (but I think under different circumstances), and this also seems like switching to pipewire solved it (was using pulse before as well).

Thread here: Headphone volume resets itself to 100% - #2 by hmenke

2 Likes

Thanks for responding! I tried that, but it didn’t make any difference. However, I discovered that the problem is exclusive to Firefox. See this new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjtpOhRmIBA. Here I have firefox on the very left, chrome in the middle, and pavucontrol on the right. The audio volume stays sane in chrome, but with firefox it jumps to 100%.

I experience the same issue, but I’m using the spotify client. Firefox is open but without audio streams… so it doesn’t look exclusive to Firefox

Do you have the same issue with Firefox? Would you be able to check whether you have the issue in chrome?

I actually have open firefox most of the time but these audio bugs are really hard to reproduce. The 100% haven’t experienced any volume jump yesterday or today…