While using parole pulled from the current(as of filing) git pull, after it's opened it resets my volume levels, this also happens when clicking on the volume button. I set it to high priority as this can be quite startling and I imagine possibly even harmful if headphones are being used. My setup: Debian sid/experimental Gnome 3.4 Pulse
Sorry, actually the volume change happens on load of the first media file, not on start of the program.
+1, this bug affects me too on Archlinux, Xfce 4.10 and using Parole 0.5 (and Pulseaudio).
Parole saves and loads the volume-state on startup, so checking the volume-value in xfconf would be a first step. The other thing I'd be interested in is whether you opened pavucontrol (or are you using a different mixer for pulseaudio?) before opening parole or playing with parole and checking the volume-changes that happen there. I'm using pulseaudio myself (Xubuntu) and can't reproduce your problems at all. So far the only oddity I see is that the volume in pavucontrol doesn't mirror the volume in Parole exactly (it's off by a few %), but that could be an issue of the pulseaudio backend of gstreamer (we use gstreamer to change the volume).
I'm using the gnome 3 mixer, and while observing the "Applications" pane, it seems that parole is setting the Master channel volume to be equal to its own channel's volume.
First off, I can only test with pavucontrol which doesn't expose a "master" channel – or, if what I see here as "master" is what you have there in gnome3-mixer too, Parole doesn't change it. What I noticed though is that Parole's volume-changes are by far not in sync with pavucontrol's volume-meter, so e.g. 10% in Parole would match 40% in pavucontrol etc. I just now pushed a patch to master that fixed that for me, so pavucontrol and Parole are now in sync again (when changing the volume in Parole). Please test whether this patch has any effect on your situation (I "secretly" hope it resolves it).
Please test this again. I just pushed another patch that (in combination with Simon's) may fix this issue.
Please test this again and let us know if there is any improvement.
I'm going to go ahead and close this bug. We've had a number of fixes for the inconsistent volume settings and default audio devices. If you happen across this bug again, feel free to reopen this bug or start a new one. Thanks!