[riskable]

PulseAudio provides this feature and actually provides more features and functionality than Windows. Ubuntu's default mixer isn't the greatest so I recommend this instead:

    sudo apt install pavucontrol

You can then find it in the application menu labeled, "PulseAudio Volume Control". It lets you set the volume for individual applications (and with Chrome, individual tabs!) and also pick which output/input device will be used.

It lets you configure some neat tricks. For example, you can setup an audio device that forwards to another computer running PulseAudio, an RTP receiver, and a few other similar protocols then set say, Spotify to output to that device. So if you have some network-enabled audio receiver somewhere in your house/office/whatever you can send audio from your Linux workstation to it.

You can of course also pass that audio through various filters/plugins to mess with the sound before it goes out to the remote receiver. For example, equalize it, noise removal, etc. PulseAudio supports LADSPA plugins so if you wanted to you could setup a little Raspberry Pi audio receiver at your front door and yell at solicitors in a robotic voice from your desktop. All with a bit of PulseAudio configuration fiddling =)

[drostie]

I still remember the first time I was in a computer lab and I leaned too far away from my computer and my headphones that were blaring music popped out... and the whole room WASN'T subjected to the same loud music. And I opened up the Kubuntu audio controls and plugged in my headphones and the volume slider suddenly jumped up, then I unplugged again and it muted again. "Woah."

I remember trying it on whatever Windows computers were in the lab just to make sure I wasn't crazy and that this wasn't there all along, and sure enough, they kept the same volume no matter whether the headphones were plugged in or not.

One of the first PulseAudio victories I remember, at a time when I vaguely recall that it was a newcomer and people were really pissed at PulseAudio's bugs and recommending just straight ALSA instead.

[icebraining]

+1, PA + pavucontrol are very flexible. You don't even need weird protocols to send your audio to another computer, I just used its tunnel module (enable it in the receiver, then configure its IP on the sender) to send my browser's audio output to my home server, which has a decent stereo attached. The latency is quite good too, the delay even over wifi is barely noticeable.

[JetSpiegel]

There's also pulseaudio-dlna[0]. It works as advertised.

[0] https://github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna

[j_s]

Thanks for the heads-up! This is one thing I miss mightily on my Mac.