Sound volume slider in ports

Are you guys happy with it? In most ports I can't call the lowest value above zero quiet. It is already quite loud. I would appreciate if it was more flexible.

If that is the case you have set your general output too high. Ports normally only expose the 0.0 - 1.0 range the underlying sound system exposes.

Hmm. Is there any reason why it's not done like on e.g. Youtube, where I can set it to a very low value and then I'll be barely able to hear it? Sounds like a better system maybe...

Oh, good, a thread about sound volume. I think I'll ask my question here.

In Chocolate Heretic, why the music is so loud? I literally set sound effects to 15 (max) and music to 1, but the music is still louder than the sound effects for some reason. Why's that? How to fix it?

Does it get louder when increasing the volume? If no, it may be that it's played by an external process that's not subject to the volume control.

Which source ports in particular? You may be referring to the fact that some (all?) SDL 1.2 ports don't handle music and sfx volume very gracefully. For example, using native midi output will have ingame music volume change the OS mixer volume; setting music volume to zero will result in no sfx either. Similarly, high music volumes result in blown out sfx.

In zdoom-likes the lowest volume option is already quite quiet for me, but you can always set sfx_volume in console to something smaller than 0.05. For instance, 0.01 is very quiet on my machine.

3DGE handles this well via Timidity MIDI/MUS playback. There are also additional options to adjust the Timidity "loudness" factor. Does not affect SFX. Midi mixer will not work if running anything above Windows XP.

It seems that ports also affect each other? I change the music volume in ZDaemon and then it also changes in prboom-plus. Also if I play some midi with Windows Media Player, it can affect the volume in prboom-plus too. This is all so confusing and it makes me change the settings again and again.

Thank Windows and its broken MIDI volume setting for that.
Your only option would be to use software for MIDI playback that doesn't use the system's playback function.

Odamex built in its own internal midi management library (portmidi) to handle midi events and playback on windows. It allows for changing the midi music volume without affecting the other sliders on Windows Vista and above while still using the Microsoft GS synth. I'm unsure why more ports that generally rely on sdl_mixer haven't adopted it