My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.
I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?
Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.
Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.
[1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.
They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.
I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing.
And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for decompressing the video. On the other hand, if you’re already starved for CPU time…
That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.
I often write small userscripts to neutralise hostile or annoying UI patterns. I played the 'Hostile Volume' game for a while. Nice game! After a while, I wondered: if this were a real hostile website, could I write a userscript to make each level happy? Here is the script:
If you don't have a userscript manager, you can just copy the script between the two backticks and paste it to the web browser's Developer Tools console.
This is not an issue at all, but when ever I come across something like it, I like to poke at the frontend in dev tools a bit. You can pass most levels with `setVolume(25)` in the web console, since that function is just sitting in the document object. That feels like the ultimate volume UI puzzle heh.
Please don't. The game was fun, but level 22 didn't work on Tor Browser due to CORS errors. At first I thought the "NETWORK ERROR. TRY AGAIN" was part of the game until I saw the actual network tab. I wouldn't have made it past level 22 if not for the console command. Plus, if someone wants to cheat, why not?
I am familiar with this game. I play a variant of it on iOS everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, with my AirPods and iPhone. I'm not very good though. Somehow iOS always wins and finds a hostile volume to initiate playback with regardless of what I do with the UI.
It's actually possible to turn a linear pot into an approximation of a log pot by wiring a resistor in parallel with the wiper and one end. The volume pot is a voltage divider so the amount it "scales" by is given by Scale = Rbottom / (Rtop + Rbottom).
But, if you put a resistor in parallel, you need to work out that:
R = 1 / ((1 / R1) + (1 / R2)) or Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Rbottom) + (1 / Rfixed)) where Rfixed is the amount you're "bending" it by.
So you could make the amount of "logness" be adjustable by having another (linear) control to vary Rfixed.
You'd work out, for a pot rotation Vol from 0 to 1:
Now for those better at arithmetic than me, how can you reverse this? Imagine you've got a pot in a piece of equipment with a resistor between the wiper and ground giving a log curve, and you've got to read that with an ADC and turn it back into the linear position of the wiper.
It ought to be possible but I've always sucked at arithmetic.
Great fun, well done to the horrible person who made it. Apparently my RSS reader leaves the browswr live in the background, as the audio is still playing. Horrible to do on a mobile device. Worst level by far was 17.
Finished the game. It was fun to play. I got stuck for a while on the opposite level where the display doesn't update, but was able to go through the rest just fine
I could tell in edge that right side was muted based on the icon next to the address bar and noticed you could use arrows to move one by one so just pressed left 25 times.
Yeah, I took that to mean to refresh the game and so I did.... and then lost my progress :(. I really want to play the rest but I don't want to go through the rest of the levels.
These mostly seem to be variations of "takes a long time / is tedious" rather than "annoying/fiddly / takes skill / is creatively bad", which is a little disappointing.
I mean technically that is a system level feature...and there's nothing really wrong with an application adjusting it's own volume as defined by a system level volume setting for that app.
My favourite bad volume control was in Real Player around 1997 where changing the volume in the application actually changed the global volume of Windows.
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.
I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?
Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many drives took it one step further and provided a play button in addition to the usual eject button, which worked even if the drive wasn't plugged at all into a machine. The audio was typically output both to the front panel headphone jack and to a 4-pin connector on the back of the drive, which you were supposed to connect to one of your sound card's aux inputs so that it would get mixed into the system audio output.
Unfortunately, a decent number of machines were not fitted with the relevant cable. Combined with the low-quality DACs that most drives used, the compatibility issues that plagued ATAPI implementations and the dramatic increase in CPU power and sound card quality throughout the mid-to-late 90s, this led media player software to quickly move on from drive based playback to so-called "digital audio extraction", where the CD is basically ripped in real time and streamed to your sound card's own DAC. Thus, unless you played older games that relied on hardware CD-DA playback [1], it's somewhat unlikely you ever experienced it under, say, Windows 98 or XP.
[1] As offloading playback to the drive had no CPU overhead, games often stored their music as additional tracks on the game disc and played it that way. Incidentally, basically all CD-ROM-based game consoles and arcade systems relied heavily on hardware accelerated playback as well, with some going even further and allowing for compressed (ADPCM) CD audio streaming with no CPU intervention.
They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.
Did you ever try using the drive with the computer switched off?
I remember my father powering one of these old cd ROM drives, without a computer and using it to play music CDs using these jack connecter
It's funny because Microsoft Teams does this today, in 2026.
Happy I never had to use Teams so far. Only heard bad things about it lol.
Then you knowall there is to say about it.
I feel like that was super common. Apart from changing the volumes of entire channels (e.g. changing the level of Line In vs. digital sound), volume was a relatively “global” thing.
And I’m not sure if that was still the case in 1997, but most likely changing the volume of digital sound meant the CPU having to process the samples in realtime. Now on one hand, that’s probably dwarfed by what the CPU had to do for decompressing the video. On the other hand, if you’re already starved for CPU time…
That was a hardware/software thing as far as I remember. If it was using something like DirectSound it would adjust the audio independently. Other media players did the same thing.
I often write small userscripts to neutralise hostile or annoying UI patterns. I played the 'Hostile Volume' game for a while. Nice game! After a while, I wondered: if this were a real hostile website, could I write a userscript to make each level happy? Here is the script:
If you don't have a userscript manager, you can just copy the script between the two backticks and paste it to the web browser's Developer Tools console.This is not an issue at all, but when ever I come across something like it, I like to poke at the frontend in dev tools a bit. You can pass most levels with `setVolume(25)` in the web console, since that function is just sitting in the document object. That feels like the ultimate volume UI puzzle heh.
I'll have to patch that!
Please don't. The game was fun, but level 22 didn't work on Tor Browser due to CORS errors. At first I thought the "NETWORK ERROR. TRY AGAIN" was part of the game until I saw the actual network tab. I wouldn't have made it past level 22 if not for the console command. Plus, if someone wants to cheat, why not?
I had to use it for #19, since YouTube doesn't load on my machine. Patching it would make the game unplayable past level 19.
I am familiar with this game. I play a variant of it on iOS everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, with my AirPods and iPhone. I'm not very good though. Somehow iOS always wins and finds a hostile volume to initiate playback with regardless of what I do with the UI.
There are two types of volume slider I've encountered thus far, "too logarithmic", and "not logarithmic enough".
That's because one ear is logarithmic-based and the other is exponential-based. Which one differs per person.
Do you have a source, that seems unlikely at face value to me, though I've never gone and looked for perception studies myself.
I think they're joking, this is on a thread about silly volume control UX
It’s satire.
Always hard to tell.
It's actually possible to turn a linear pot into an approximation of a log pot by wiring a resistor in parallel with the wiper and one end. The volume pot is a voltage divider so the amount it "scales" by is given by Scale = Rbottom / (Rtop + Rbottom).
But, if you put a resistor in parallel, you need to work out that:
R = 1 / ((1 / R1) + (1 / R2)) or Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Rbottom) + (1 / Rfixed)) where Rfixed is the amount you're "bending" it by.
So you could make the amount of "logness" be adjustable by having another (linear) control to vary Rfixed.
You'd work out, for a pot rotation Vol from 0 to 1:
Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Vol) + (1 / Rfixed)) Rtop = 1 - Vol Scale = Rbottom / (Rbottom + Rtop)
Now for those better at arithmetic than me, how can you reverse this? Imagine you've got a pot in a piece of equipment with a resistor between the wiper and ground giving a log curve, and you've got to read that with an ADC and turn it back into the linear position of the wiper.
It ought to be possible but I've always sucked at arithmetic.
This works for almost all levels:
The worst volume control UI in the world (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
Great fun, well done to the horrible person who made it. Apparently my RSS reader leaves the browswr live in the background, as the audio is still playing. Horrible to do on a mobile device. Worst level by far was 17.
Laughed out loud but gave up at level 5
Finished the game. It was fun to play. I got stuck for a while on the opposite level where the display doesn't update, but was able to go through the rest just fine
I could tell in edge that right side was muted based on the icon next to the address bar and noticed you could use arrows to move one by one so just pressed left 25 times.
Much harder on a mobile device!
Im just happy theres someone out there who cares for masochists.
Got an error on Level 17, just a heads up.
Love the game, btw.
Yeah, I took that to mean to refresh the game and so I did.... and then lost my progress :(. I really want to play the rest but I don't want to go through the rest of the levels.
Its intentional. Glad you like it!
ok but i manually used arrow keys to set it to by clicking right 25 times, and that didn't work, so i gave up.
that’s not an error
Level 17 is NOT bugged. The slider is backward and the volume nonresponsive. Its a planned feature.
I still like to pretend that everyone played flash games growing up
Yes, this took me a very long time to work out.
Hilarious, some of them are easy with the keyboard
Level 27 is not possible.
I have encountered the rate-limited spinner (#8) and the self-resizing slider (#5) in real desktop UIs.
#3 are almost like Google Maps' zooming buttons. They jump around more, making you click on the map itself or swap in/out.
somehow i'm amazed and annoyed at the same time
Plenty of annoyance in here for sure. Looks like 17 cannot be finished on mobile though. Switching to desktop view resets progress.
Not sure how on desktop either, I've inspected the value and set it to 25 to no avail :P
edit: ok... somehow my approach didn't work the first time, but got to 18!
Look where the slider sits initially at 75%, not the same as earlier levels ;)
It works fine on mobile. Planned feature. You'll encounter the same offscreen popup on desktop.
Prwtty neat. Unfortunately wasn't able to solve the UI desync one :/
It's inverted, 100 == 0, 75 == 25
These mostly seem to be variations of "takes a long time / is tedious" rather than "annoying/fiddly / takes skill / is creatively bad", which is a little disappointing.
...and, of course, there's really no need for a volume control in any app, since there's already a system volume...
There are cases where you want to have 2 applications running and playing sound, and want to set the relative volume of each...
I mean technically that is a system level feature...and there's nothing really wrong with an application adjusting it's own volume as defined by a system level volume setting for that app.
Meanwhile, iPhone is still using this design https://xkcd.com/1884/