vlcj: player.mute() has no effect when player is not playing

I am seeing the following behavior when toggling mute in vlcj:

before first playback of mediaPlayer: mediaPlayer.audio().mute() works fine
when playing: mediaPlayer.audio().mute() works fine
after first playback of mediaPlayer (when stopped): mediaPlayer.audio().mute() has no effect

Problem: I have a mute button in my UI. When pressed, the button icon changes. But when started, the player is not muted, which makes the button show the wrong icon. It seems that you have to wait for the player to start playing before being able to mute it. I could get around this by calling setMute() on the first time-changed event, but it has the effect that even if muted through the UI beforehand, you will hear a fraction of the audio before setMute() takes effect. I have read this post: https://github.com/caprica/vlcj/issues/395 but it's quite old. I was wondering if there are better options now? In native VLC I don't see this issue, but I learned that it is not using libvlc. Is there anything one could do to get around this problem?

The vlcj sample application shows the same behavior btw: play some mp3 file, stop the player, toggle mute and start the player again -> the player is not muted.

setVolume() seems to have the same issue.

Unfortunately, this is just how the native media player in LibVLC 3.x works.

This does work as expected with LibVLC 4.x, and therefore vlcj-5.x, but VLC 4.x is likely still some way off from a full release, it's only available in unsupported pre-release nightly builds at the moment.

There may be some workarounds, but they will not be ideal - e.g. you could manage the mute/volume state yourself and apply it immediately when the media starts playing (listen for a "media player ready" event) - but obviously here you may get a short blip of unwanted (or missing) audio.

Instead of listening for "media player ready", you could maybe try applying the mute/volume on receipt of an "elementary stream selected" event with type audio, but I'm not sure this will work or be any better to be honest.

It may also be beneficial to listen to the various audio-related media player events, you have "muted" and "volume changed", and more recently "corked". At least then you might be able to keep your UI controls in sync with the actual state of the media player, even though it is not quite what you want.

So in short, I'm afraid with LibVLC 3.x there is not a good solution here.