[pulseaudio-discuss] Hpw to start the pa server

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Gene Heskett at 15/04/10 14:44 did gyre and gimble:
> Aha!  I found it!  I configured kmix to show me every channel, which makes it 
> about 2x my 1680 screen width, and pulled its window to about 1/2 screen 
> height so I could read all the labels, and found the last control on the 
> right was muted.  It is called "Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack"
> I knew that turning on the IEC-958 muted it, and that is muted as it should 
> be.

Excellent!

> Frankly, I am inclined to say its a bug, when selecting the analog stereo 
> output in pavucontrol, that it should be automatically un-muted.

Yup a bug indeed. It seems like a case of another bizarrely named
driver-specific control that generally mucks things up for us!

In order to test the fix, can you try adding the following lines to then
end of
/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common:

[Element Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack]
switch = off


Then restart PA. That should tell it to turn that switch off and thus
prevent the problem.

> And it doesn't have near the gain it did have.  Listening to cnn, I have
> everything wide open and its just a comfortable level. (to these 75 year old 
> ears that is)

:)

> It certainly would not wake anybody outside this room.  There 
> is also a background hum that comes and goes, somewhat like the 59.94hz vs 60 
> hz beat from the old NTSC broadcast facility, like something is wide open.

PA will open the sound device when something wants to play and then it
will shut it down again after about 2s of inactivity. This background
hum is likely a product of having the device open.

> That was the microphone circuit, which has nothing plugged in but a cable 
> about 6" long that jumps the pcHDTV-3000 tv cards output back into the 
> Audigy2.  And I just got the pling from kmail's new mail pinger.
> 
> It also sounds as if there is a lot of bass boost that wasn't there before, 
> and despite its running at what pavucontrol says is just an average level, I 
> am hearing some digital flat topping.  I'll probably be able to find that 
> eventually.

There are probably various things that ultimately need to be exposed via
PA's mixer systems to get this fully supported. This is likely something
for another day/thread tho' :)

> So, we have a case closed I believe, and a bug that ought to be fixed.

Indeed. If you could let me know if the above mixer-path fix solves the
problem fully for you, that would be great (ideally, you'd stop PA, run:
 amixer -c0 set "Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack" on

then start PA and run:
 amixer -c0 get "Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack"

just to make sure that PA has indeed turned it off for you :)

> Thank you for your patience Colin.

No worries :) Glad you can now enjoy the sound on Mandriva :D

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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