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isa

Member

Registered: 2022-12-06

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Function keys change volume for 2 outputs

My set up is KDE + PulseAudio + Bluez and I also installed pulseaudio-bluetooth and plasma-pa packages. My laptop (thinkpad x260)'s F1-F3 keys are set by manufacturer to manipulate volume.
My bluetooth headphones have their own volume buttons which, if used, will only affect the volume of the headphones in my system. But if I use my keyboard's function keys, the volume will change for both the headphones and the laptop's speakers.
The chosen audio output doesn't change from this, but having to make sure that my speakers are actually on silent after disconnecting headphones gets a little annoying.
I've looked at System Settings > Shortcuts and as far as I understand the shortcuts there are supposed to be device-agnostic. I also checked "System Settings > Audio", "Audio Volume (in tray) > Configure Audio Volume..." and looked at wiki pages for Bluetooth, PulseAudio, Xorg, KDE, etc. and did not find anything that could be related to my issue.
The wiki page for KDE adviced to install 'plasma-pa' as a solution for "No volume control icon in tray and cannot adjust sound by function key", but it didn't affect anything in my case.
I've never experienced this before on different distros, or ever experimented with audio drivers on Linux to that matter, and I'm a bit clueless as to where to look at next. Any ideas?

Last edited by isa (2022-12-08 13:37:18)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,668

Re: [SOLVED] Function keys change volume for 2 outputs

The "default" logic in plasma-pa should change volume for whatever your active audio sink is, so if you're listening on the headset then plasma-pa would make sure to increase that volume when it receives the Xf86VolumeUp key. If this changes both it might be that the HW vendor internally changes them regardless this can sometimes be manipulated with wmi kernel modules otherwise you might be SoL. FWIW you do not have multiple pulse mixers active that might interfere? e.g. run kmix as well as plasma-pa and both receive the event and do different things?

isa

Member

Registered: 2022-12-06

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Function keys change volume for 2 outputs

FWIW you do not have multiple pulse mixers active that might interfere? e.g. run kmix as well as plasma-pa and both receive the event and do different things?

I actually ended up having KMix and plasma-pa running in parallel while trying to find a solution to this, but the problem appeared before I had two mixers at the same time installed, originally I only had KMix.
Unfortunately I don't know exactly what has fixed my issue but I think it might had something to do with me removing KMix and/or Pulseaudio. I left plasma-pa and set up Pipewire to replase Pulseaudio. Now everything works as expected.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,668

Re: [SOLVED] Function keys change volume for 2 outputs

Will likely have been kmix and plasma-pa running in parallel

Please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post (might have to shorten it a bit)