[LAU] How to prevent applications from changing my mic level?

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 5 May 2020, S. wrote:

> Hi there, recently I've been running into major problems with Electron apps
> for the Linux desktop (Microsoft Teams and Riot.im) modifying my mic input
> levels. Also Chrome / Chromium do the same thing during WebRTC calls, they
> raise my mic level to 100%, thus completely saturating the audio and making
> it unusable. I drop it back down manually, but within a few seconds it
> creeps back up to 100% again. In Windows there's an option to not allow
> programs to control a specific device. Is there any way to do this with ALSA
> and/or PulseAudio? Thanks a lot.

Use jack as the back end for pulse and unload the alsa and udev modules 
from pulse. Pulse sees jack as the only sink/source and has no access to 
alsa controls. Any level adjustments pulse can do from there on are dsp 
level changes.

Thats what I know best because I run jack all the time anyway. however, I 
think it should also be possible to change the device profile for your 
device in pulse to use that directly. (that is break the profile :) ) on 
my machine pulse hides its profiles in:
/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/
I do not konw how to set profiles up or really how they work. I am blessed 
with an audio device that pulse finds confusing and leaves alone (ice1712 
based).

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net