Hi there, recently I've been running into major problems with Electron apps for 
the Linux desktop (Microsoft Teams and Riot.im) modifying my mic input levels. 
Also Chromium/Chrome do the same thing during WebRTC calls, they raise my mic 
level to 100%, thus completely saturating the audio and making it unusable. I 
drop it back down manually, but within a few seconds it creeps back up to 100% 
again. In my case it tries to max out the mic gain, but I've read lots of other 
user reports where it tries to lower the user's mic gain to an unusable level.

Sometimes this is the result of a "smart" VoIP program like Skype that has an 
option to allow the program to adjust the audio device levels. But my problem is that all 
my VoIP apps use WebRTC, which appears to include its own implementation of AGC as part 
of the protocol, and it's obviously buggy in anything based on Chromium (Chrome, electron 
apps, etc.), and there's no way to disable it. There have been bug reports to Chrome(ium) 
for years about this and they obviously don't care. Firefox doesn't exhibit this 
behavior, but unfortunately a lot of WebRTC apps are either Electron (based on Chromium) 
or else don't support Firefox very well. Ultimately, I think this behavior should be 
controllable via PulseAudio, since we can never assume all apps with have sane behavior.

In Windows there's an option to not allow programs to control a specific 
device. I think we also desperately need a PulseAudio option to disable direct 
access to the audio hardware. It appears this should be possible in 
`/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf` by 
changing `volume = merge` to `volume = off` or `volume = XX` according to what 
I've read. But since the profiles are under `/usr/share/` they're obviously not 
meant to be user configurable, which I think should be changed.

I'd really appreciate it if you could make this behavior user-configurable, 
possibly by looking for the profiles somewhere under `/etc/pulse` and/or 
`~/.config/pulse/`.

Thanks a lot!
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