alsa weirdness (very quiet and bassy)

airyk

i emerged kde-3.2 and alsa started being funky, as it seems it has for alot of people. I removed all of alsa and installed 1.0.2, which caused arts to stop crashing, and the sound worked perfectly. then i loged out and back into my session, and the sound got very quiet and very bassy (but arts still doesn't crash, so there is 1 good thing). I messed around with alsamixer to see if one of my levels was messed up, but it's kinda difficult cause i have 56 sliders that come up when i run alsamixer. (i have a soundblaster live! card). i noticed that the only slider that affects the volume is "Wave Surround," and even with the level set to 100 the sound is still quiet and very bassy. Even with the Tone channel unmuted and the bass set to 0 the sound is still very bassy.

one thing that bothers me is that the Master channel doesn't affect the sound level at all (and this was the case as well when I had alsa working well under kde-3.1.5)

MarioCorleone · Guru Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 336

sounds like your master channel is down and your pmc is way up
_________________
-Mario

airyk · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:49 pm Post subject:

that's the thing, my master channel does not affect the sound level at all, nor does the PCM channel, only the Wave Surround channel affect the sound level. the master channel never affected the sound level, even when alsa was working correctly (but i guess, technically, it wasn't working correctly, but at least the sound was coming out correctly)

minimizebeefgoo · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 5:41 pm Post subject:

Having only Wave Surround control the volume is a problem with the rear output (the black one). Master and PCM should control the front output (the green one).

As for being quiet, that seems really odd to me, since even with Wave Surround at 1%, the rear output is still too loud for me to use with my headphones.

jaccort · n00b Joined: 02 Dec 2003 Posts: 54

I have a similar problem with sound. I have an onboard soundcard - via82xx based. Until recently I've been using KDE 3.1 & kernel 2.4.23 with no problems.

Just emerge'd KDE 3.2 (which broke sound altogether) and upgraded to kernel 2.6 (which fixed it again).

Unfortunately it's not very well fixed - sound quality is almost inaudibly quiet and very tinny. This was never a problem in KDE 3.1/Kernel 2.4.x.

Anyone else had a similar problem?

flyingbird · n00b Joined: 31 Aug 2003 Posts: 18

same type of thing for me when i upgraded to kde 3.2

left channel sound is now tied to 3d depth control and so it is always very quiet. i can't for the life of me correct this.

Danathan · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 120

My system sounded like garbage until I turned the 3D Effects in KMix all the way down. If you're having kde related problems it's worth it to test your alsa setup from a terminal to see if it's alsa that's giving you problems or kde that's causing the problems.

FWIW, I'm running gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.7-gentoo-r13 w/alsa support, and kde 3.2.3-r1 (or whatever the stable kde is these days) & I've got an Intel 8280 AC'97 sound card.

Hope this helps. There are too many points of mixing (&, by extension, failure) for me...