[pulseaudio-discuss] Controlling pulseaudio volume with kmix

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 30 May 2009 13:13:17 Piero Filippin wrote:

I don't know a lot about using multi-channel outputs but it seems to me that if you want your KMix master volume to work then you need to follow my first piece of advice

    1) right-clicking on KMix in the system tray and 'Select Master Channel' - try changing the master channel and see if that makes any difference.

You may have to experiment to find out which of the displayed channels works. KMix saying 'HDA NVidia' is correct - that means KMix is directly controlling the mixer of your sound card, which is good. However it sounds as if it's confused as to which channel is which - you should be able to unconfuse it by finding out which is the master channel.

If that doesn't work then I'm out of ideas.

When I suggested alsamixer I forgot about the alsa-pulse module, which just confuses matters in this case - forget about that for now.

Mark

> Hi Mark,
> to be honest I do not know anything about the relationships between 
> ALSA, pulse, kmix etc.
> 
> it seems ALSA is working (i have something like alsa-pulse installed).
> 
> If I use alsamix - it says:
> Card: PulseAudio ?
> Chip: PulseAudio
> 
> and has 4 master channels. They affects the sound in a weird way, I mean 
> the channel mapping is wrong
> The first master control the front left and rear left
> The second master the front center and rear right
> The third the rear right
> The fourth the LFE
> I know where to change the mapping, but I will not bother at the moment.
> 
> In kmix I see complete different controls, it says HDA NVidia (I guess 
> it should say Pulseaudio), with Master (only the mute works), and then 
> front, surround, side center LFE etc all not having any effect.
> 
> Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > On Saturday 30 May 2009 12:03:13 Piero Filippin wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi,
> >> first of all I want to thank everyone for their work on pulseaudio. I 
> >> always thought Linux audio sucked, finally something which make sense 
> >> (and works)!
> >> I enabled the a52 in asound.conf, and finally I can enjoy surround sound!
> >>
> >> However, I am having 2 issues. First of all, for some reasons I cannot 
> >> understand, I cannot use the a52 output on pavucontrol, the sound is 
> >> "choppy", this means something like 100ms of audio every second - but 
> >> "simultaneous output on a52" works like a charm. Just a weirdness.
> >>
> >> The only serious issue: I am not able to do is to change the volume with 
> >> kde4 kmix (I was able to before enabling a52). I can change the volume 
> >> on every single application (eg volume slider in amarok2 or mplayer) or 
> >> using pavucontrol, but changing the volume in kmix has no effect (only 
> >> the master mute works, and it was not working before).
> >>
> >> Am I missing something obvious? Is this supposed to work? What I am 
> >> really interested into is to change the "global" volume, kmix lets me 
> >> use the mouse wheel on the tray icon and the volume keys on my 
> >> multimedia keyboard.
> >>     
> >
> > Doesn't sound like a PA issue to me, more likely ALSA. 
> > Stuff you could try:
> > 1) right-clicking on KMix in the system tray and 'Select Master Channel' - try changing the master channel and see if that makes any difference.
> > 2) in a terminal, try 'alasmixer' - this controls the same interface that KMix controls (i.e. the underlying ALSA mixer, not the PA mixer). You should be able to use that to work out which channel does what. Possibly, since you enabled a52, ALSA is confused about what the 'Master' channel is.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >   
> >> Thank you for any help/suggestion.
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
> >>
> >>     
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