Volume of notification sounds in Empathy

I have been away from Gnome for too long, I guess. Until very recently, I was on the Awesome window manager but after upgrading to a new Harddrive (yes, I still upgrade my hardware old-skool way instead of buying something new), I though I'll give Gnome another look.

Also, I was feeling a little guilty about Ubuntu ditching Gnome for Unity.

While shifting, I also thought that I'll move my standard chatting program from Pidgin to Empathy, which seemed to be better integrated with Gnome. However, I had this constant problem of not getting any sound notifications when anyone pinged me (also because I keep playing music continuously in the background). The preferences did not give me an idea of what was wrong:

Sound preferences in Empathy 2.32.1

 So I tried reverting to Pidgin and the sound there worked. Once glance at the Sound preferences tab gave me a clear indication of what was missing:

Sound preferences in Pidgin 2.7.3

If you have not guessed, the part missing was the volume of the notifications. Out of my hunch, I went to Ubuntu Sound preferences and increased the Alert Volume (which were very low by default?) to the maximum:

Sound preferences in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

... and it fixed my problem!

Lesson learned: Uniting preferences may make them a little non-intuitive to find.

Hope it helps you.