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Okay, I ran into this very weird issue today, which I solved, but I'm putting it here anyway in case someone finds it useful, or can figure out how/why it happened.
For two days I'd been noticing that whenever I played something with VLC, I'd get sound only on the right channel. I thought my earphones might have given up, but then I noticed that while using YouTube from Chrome, I'd get sound on both outputs. I tested a bunch of scenarios where GNOME would sound the system alert sound, and sure enough, they came out of both ears. Re-booted into Windows on the same laptop and I got sound on both ears. But VLC and Totem both refused to give me sound on the left ear.
After messing around with ALSA settings, and seeing nothing that could be fixed there, I finally ended up installing pavucontrol to inspect PulseAudio settings. I kept Chrome playing while I tweaked around in pavucontrol, but nothing was amiss. But lo and behold, the moment I started up VLC, the volume control for the left channel for VLC on pavucontrol went down to 3%.
I turned up the volume on the left channel so that both were equal. It seems to have fixed the issue for Totem as well.
So any idea what caused this, or should I blame it on a ghost or something? ;-)
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