[pulseaudio-discuss] problem with volume control messed up

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2016-09-30 at 01:17 +0200, Ernest Adrogué wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I have a problem with the volume control.  Music plays through the speakers
> as usual, no problem here.
> 
> The default mixer only has one control and has no effect at all.  I can
> change the volume with alsamixer after selecting the card's mixer instead of
> the default one which is PA's.
> 
> In pavucontrol I see that the output device is labelled "Headphones" so the
> mixer is probably changing the headphones output volume.  There is no other
> port, only Headphones.  However this card has no headphones output as far as
> I know.
> 
> Then I noticed that if I change the profile from Analog stereo output to
> "Analog surround 5.1" then the port in output devices changes to "Analog
> output" and then the volume control does affect the speakers volume.
> 
> What can I do to fix the analog stereo profile so that the volume control
> works?

I guess you're using the line-out jack of the sound card? Apparently
the kernel driver doesn't give any indication that a line-out jack
exists.

"amixer -c0 controls | grep Jack" prints all jack controls on card 0
(it might not print anything for your card). Typically the jack
controls are used for detecting whether there's something plugged in
the jack, but they're useful also for figuring out what physical jacks
exist. If the hardware doesn't support detecting the presence of a plug
in the jack, the driver should still create a "phantom" jack control.
You can ask the alsa developers to add the phantom jack for your sound
card.

> I use the standard configuration from my distribution, which is Debian, and
> the volume control was working fine until recently.

I think the reason why it stopped working was that we fixed something
that allowed pulseaudio to detect the headphone port. Prior to that we
didn't have any idea of the outputs of the card, so volume control
affected all outputs. I don't remember the details of this, but we
certainly can't just revert the fix to make your sound card working
again. The driver needs to be fixed.

-- 
Tanu