Prevent mplayer from changing system volume

Question

When I change the volume in mplayer it also changes for other applications. How can I configure mplayer to only change its own volume? Or is this a problem with the rest of the audio stack? I am using alsa with esd.

Answer 1

mplayer takes a -softvol flag that makes it use the software audio mixer instead of the sound card. If you want it on permanently, you can add the following to ~/.mplayer/config:

softvol=true