volume control?

[Tyler]

this question is perhaps a bit misplaced, but i thought i'd give it a shot
here.

by way of introduction, i (was, before finding a job) doing the actual mp3
playback implementation for the Ambient project (ambient.sf.net -- it's
linked on the sdl_sound homepage thanks to ryan :)). short version:
ambient is an overgrown mp3 jukebox project.

anyway, we'd like for ambient to be able to control the mixer volume on
the machine on which it's playing mp3s. this seems like a fairly obvious
thing for a sound library to be able to do, yet this functionality appears
to be missing from SDL. the closest thing i've found is the volume
parameter to SDL_MixAudio(), but this is doing some kind of unpleasant
software sound-mixing, which isn't really what we want [1].

i'm especially surprised that SDL doesn't have this functionality since
SDL is supposed to be an abstraction layer for porting. since volume
control varies so much between platforms, it seems an obvious piece to
have in SDL.

so does SDL have volume control capabilities that i've just been unable to
find? is there a reason it isn't in SDL? can someone recommend a
reasonable replacement?

tia,
tyler

[1] sdl_sound eschews SDL_MixAudio() in favor of the more pedestrian,
straightforward, and almost-identically-functional memcpy, anyway, which
is another clue that this is not what i want.

-- 
"E190 - Midterm.doc: 2,309 characters (an approximate value)"
 --Microsoft Word, on meaningful approximation