[pulseaudio-discuss] PA is very silent; doen't use the max hardware volume

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 23/01/14 19:03, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 2014/1/23 Nikos Chantziaras <realnc at gmail.com>:
>> I'm not sure what's going on here. I get conflicting control names when
>> using amixer to show them. "amixer -c0" shows the following:
>>
>>    http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=TxauYevj
>>
>> There is no "Master Front" anywhere to be seen.
>
> OK. The problem is that the card has a 6-channel Master control that
> alsamixer converts into three controls, including "Master Front" that
> confused us. Unfortunately, PulseAudio cannot handle such controls.
> There is a FIXME about this:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/tree/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c#n1603
>
> To Clemens Ladisch: sorry for falsely blaming you about this bug.
>
> To Nikos Chantziaras: until this is fixed, you'll have to live with
> software volume control. To make the desired hardware Master volume
> persist across reboots, please follow these two steps.
>
> 1. alsamixer -c0, set it to the desired level.
> 2. sudo alsactl store

Thanks for the pointer to the source code! I was able to get this to 
work by applying this extremely dumb patch:

   http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=6gj6idSf

Seems to work OK. The hardware volumes are now adjusted correctly.

If anyone else is suffering from the same problem, is using Gentoo, and 
wants to apply this patch, copy it as:

   /etc/portage/patches/media-sound/pulseaudio/dumb.patch

and then simply re-install pulseaudio. Portage will apply the patch 
automatically during the emerge process.