Alsa hardware volume with PulseAudio

1

Before installing pulseaudio, I was able to control volume for the front (meaning on the front panel, the "headphone" jack) and rear (meaning on the back panel, the "line out" jack) separately.

When I installed pulseaudio, it became possible to control volume for each playing process separately, but the individual controls for outputs disappeared.

While the default device in alsa now routes via pulseaudio, the sysdefault device provides access to the hardware. But kmix does not seem to let me show them now. Is there any way to beat kmix into showing the sysdefault device too? Or something else X-based that would not fight with kmix too much?

The system is Debian Jessie (testing) amd64, updated, KDE version 4:4.13.3-1.

Jan Hudec

Posted 2014-08-20T11:39:23.680

Reputation: 885

PulseAudio does react to jack-plug events (if supported by the hw). Have you pluged something into the jacks' in question? – paradoxon – 2014-08-20T12:25:33.993

@paradoxon: Both jacks always have something connected and do play. But sometimes I want to lower volume of the loudspeakers (that can't be easily pulled out) without affecting the headphones. – Jan Hudec – 2014-08-20T14:56:37.653

@paradoxon: Besides, both jacks behave as single device. They just have separate volume controls. – Jan Hudec – 2014-08-21T09:40:21.047

Yes. If they have separate devices they technically should have separate volume controller. – paradoxon – 2014-08-21T09:59:57.773

Answers

0

I have tried a bunch of other mixers available in Debian. On console the curses-based alsamixer from alsa-utils can switch between devices, but the ones advertised as X11 counterparts don't seem to or can only select device on command-line. The only mixer I found being able to switch devices is qasmixer. It's statusbar icon is worse than the kmix one, so I am keeping kmix for the soft volume and only use qasmixer if I need to tweak the independent output levels.

Jan Hudec

Posted 2014-08-20T11:39:23.680

Reputation: 885

Try pavucontrol (version 2, 1 is deprecated) unfortunately it is a gtk based utility so it will look a bit ugly on kde but it is pretty powerful. You can find the package in Debian repos. – paradoxon – 2014-08-21T10:06:41.253

@paradoxon: I tried pavucontrol, it has "output devices" tab, but it behaves weirdly. It shows only one (stereo) volume control which control the output master and a "Port" switch and when I switch it, it changes the volume to some value. Of both outputs the same way. – Jan Hudec – 2014-08-21T12:12:15.930

@paradoxon: (styling is the least of my concerns and it is possible to apply the same style to both Gtk and Qt if desired) – Jan Hudec – 2014-08-21T12:14:44.307

Asked: 2014-08-20T11:39:23.680

Viewed: 1 224 times

Active: 2014-08-21T09:39:16.967