Fedora 11 nerfed my mixer

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 23.04.09 22:25, Andreas Thienemann (andreas at bawue.net) wrote:

Heya,

> Windows sound was fine, right volume et all. Volume knob at the speakers 
> was at 50% and the software mixer at 75%.
> 
> Now booting to Linux, sound is barely audible. Turning up the volume to 
> 100% in the mixer and turning the speakers to full was barely enough to 
> understand the music.
> 
> Using an alsa mixer to turn up the PCM volume to 100% somewhat fixed that.
> 
> But turning to an alsamixer to work around a problem with the current 
> pamixer can't be a long term solution.
> 
> What is the long term way? And no, I don't care for F11. Releases are 
> overrated anyway.

Firstly the alsa mixer init database should have set up your system
correctly. The database is incomplete unfortunately since most people
don't send in a patch for the db after they fixed those settings
manually. After running alsamixer -c0 alsa will remember and hence
they never get annoyed by that anymore so they don't remember to post
this anymore.

However my plans for F12 should hopefully help to make this issue go
away: on many machines we have quite a few volume controls in
series. e.g. on Thinkpads there is the hw volume that is controlled by
those magic keys, and then there is master, and then there is PCM. My
plan is to collapse them all into a single slider which is possible if
we have dB information about the sliders. The resulting slider would
be the multiplication of the seperate sliders. This would both
increase the range and the granularity of the overall volume slider
and also allows us to fix the mixer initialization issue a bit since
we would control both PCM and Master. 

This should fix a lot of problems for a lot of people. However it will
of course also annoy Mr. Lerwick. But I fear I have to live with that
I guess.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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