If you’re on Linux, this may have happened to you: Google Chrome’s flash plugin all of a sudden sets the audio playback volume to 100% whenever you play a youtube video which may end up in serious sound distortion for all other apps on your system, including google chrome.

Here’s how to fix it:

– make sure you have the “pavucontrol” application install (pulse audio volume control panel)

– with a youtube or other flash video running, fire up pavucontrol, it should look something like this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1983539/pavucontrol.png

Simply drag the “chrome alsa” volume slider to 30% or so and you should be all set to enjoy non-distorted sound in both chrome and Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 in my case) again.