Audio control issues. - Lemmy.World
Hello guys! I’m encountering some strange behaviour with audio controls and
volumes, nothing extreme serious, just moderate annoyance source, so I thought
maybe you can help me sort this one out! Also I hope this is the right community
for this… (intro) The thing is, I’m running Debian Bookworm, with Plasma and I
have a rather strange audio setup. It has its legacy reasons, but I use a sound
card (CMI8738/CMI8768, it has 5.1 output), and as for the speakers, I’ve got a
pair of active 2.0 speakers and an active subwoofer (which was a part of a 2.1
system, but now I just use only the woofer). These are connected separately to
the card; the stereo pair goes to the green output jack (front) and the
subwoofer goes to another, which I think is the center+woofer output. For some
reason, the center and woofer was swapped on my card, or the subwoofer was
hooked to the other channel, no idea, but I was managed to change them in
pulsaudio’s config /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf
and modifying [Mapping analog-surround-*], changing the order of lfe and
front-center in channel-map. Then I noticed I can’t really control the woofer,
it worked, the setup was working, but not in the way I wanted to. The goal was
to make the system actually control the outputs as intended and think about it
as a 2.1. Amongst the profiles, there were no 2.1 option, only stereo,
quadrophonic, 5.1 and 7.1. By adding this line to ~/.config/pulse/default.pa…
load-module module-combine channels=3 channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe
…and also editing ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf by adding these to it (tho
honestly I don’t really remember, why)… remixing-produce-lfe = yes
remixing-consume-lfe = yes lfe-crossover-freq = 120 enable-remixing = yes …I was
managed to create a virtual output that behaves actually like 2.1. I can control
both left and right channels and also the woofer on its own. Neat! (the problem)
Now I have two volume controls. One for the “real” output - the 5.1 profile and
the virtual one, the 2.1. In Plasma toolbar, changing the volume with the scroll
wheel is unpredictable, or, at least, I haven’t really figured out how it works
at the moment; sometimes it controls the real output, sometimes the virtual. On
my left screen, it usually controls the real, on the right, most of the times it
controls the virtual. But it just changed at the moment as I tried out, typing
this post. Now both of them controls the real one. The goal would be to have the
real output constantly on 100%, and every volume controlling action should be
take place on the virtual output. Also, another strange thing is that even tho
it looks like everything is fine and dandy, the overall output is low. When this
happens, usually on the real output the left, right and woofer channels
themselves are changed to lower (probably a previous state of the virtual
output) volumes. This all seems pretty random and unpredictable. If it works,
it’s awesome, and problems doesn’t occur for days, but sometimes they do, and I
have no idea why. Any ideas? (tl;dr) I’d like to know why my volume controls
(scroll wheel, volume keys) have effect on seemingly random outputs, and why do
the volume of each channel that is present my virtual output get change on the
physical setup (so the left, right and subwoofer sliders in the 5.1 output)
Thanks!
