I have felt frustrated at times, when I press the Volume Up/Down buttons on my keyboard and the sound volume in KDE becomes just too loud, or just too soft. When you are running the KDE desktop, the increments in volume change are controlled by KMix, the KDE mixer. By default, the sound volume changes with increments of 4% which means that with a few keypresses you go from almost inaudible sound to full blast. And there is no way to change that 4% increment value into something more fitting… pretty annoying.

Although… something changed with KDE 4.8!

You can change the volume increment value since KDE 4.8, but this option is not exposed in any KDE GUI. Fortunately we Slackers are not afraid to use the vi editor and therefore you can change the increment to any other value (2.5% is a nice comfortable incremental change):

  • Stop the KMix program if it is running (right-click on its icon in the systray and select “Exit“)
  • Open the KMix confguration file in a text editor: “vi $HOME/.kde/share/config/kmixrc“
  • Add the following line to the [Global] section of that file to get a 2.5% increment value instead of the default 4%:
    • VolumePercentageStep=2.5
  • Start KMix again (for instance, Alt-F2 and enter “kmix”)
  • Try your Volume Up/Down buttons – they are more fine-grained now!

Cheers, Eric