Re: [gentoo-user] alsamixer and pulseaudio - which is at fault?

[Daniel Frey]

On 12/29/2016 11:37 AM, Mick wrote:
> On Thursday 29 Dec 2016 12:26:23 Corbin Bird wrote:
>> On 12/29/2016 07:21 AM, Mick wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> My sound has been behaving erratically for a while now, probably since
>>> pulseaudio started being shipped with various desktop applications.  This
>>> is what I am talking about:
>>>
>>> Sound level undesirable
>>> ==============
>>> Kmail pops up a warning and the sound level is 100%.  The first time.  On
>>> the second warning when it happens a couple of seconds later, the sound
>>> level is back down to normal levels, say 55%.  Without me interfering
>>> with any audio settings.
>>>
>>> Some time later another warning pops up and this time the sound may be
>>> normal, a second warning a couple of seconds later may be back to 100%.
>>> It appears to me as if sound levels generated by dekstop/application
>>> warnings are adjusted dynamically on the fly and at will, but not my will
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Non-KDE applications, e.g. Pidgin bleep at top volume when IMs are
>>> sent/received.  Adjusting their volume thankfully sticks, at least for the
>>> desktop session in question.
>>>
>>>
>>> Alsamixer
>>> ======
>>>
>>> Running alsamixer shows:
>>>  Card: PulseAudio
>>>  Chip: PulseAudio
>>>
>>> with a single Master bar for adjusting the volume.  Selecting F6 shows
>>> Sound Card set to (default), with 'HDA Intel MID' and 'HDA ATI HDMI'
>>> below it.  When I select 0 for 'HDA Intel MID' I get all my familiar
>>> alsamixer settings back including Master, Headphones, Speaker, PCM, Mic,
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> Adjusting these allow me to arrive at sane volume levels as used to be the
>>> case in the past.  However, the annoying thing is these settings do not
>>> stick between reboots.
>>>
>>>
>>> On another laptop with a different audio card, things are even stranger.
>>> The card pops/crackles at boot time, but all sound is dead unless and
>>> until I run alsactl init.  Then if the sound gets quite loud, e.g. the
>>> other side of a Skype call raises their voice above a certain level, all
>>> sound is lost until I run alsactl init again.  This is becoming tedious
>>> to say the least.
>>>
>>>
>>> Have you noticed anything similar to either of the above problems ?  What
>>> may be causing these problems and are there any fixes/workarounds?  I
>>> honestly can't recall sound ever being such a pain on my systems.
>>
>> Link :
>>> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ALSA
>>
>> The link above is a good way to start. ( troubleshooting as well )
>> Gentoo has a boot shell script that does the "alsactl init" and shutdown
>> for you. ( media-sound/alsa-utils )
>> Just be sure you also take a look at "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf" and
>> make the required changes there as well.
>
> Thank you Corbin, I've already been through the article and my alsa.conf has
> been working happily for years.  This is a relatively recent problem though
> and I haven't found anything in the article that mentions these symptoms or
> addresses the problems I described above.
>

I installed pulse to deal with spdif mixing (which alsa couldn't seem to
do by itself at the time) and had odd problems until I used pulse's own
mixer. Have you tried that? media-sound/pavucontrol - and it wasn't
installed with pulse, I had to install it separately. I remember looking
around for a curses-based mixer but at the time couldn't find one.

I remember there was a setting there somewhere that was making something
not quite work, I changed it and it's all good now.

Dan