'Front' and 'PCM' mixer control elements must be unmuted by default on HDA platforms

For this laptop, it also helps to add:

options snd_hda_intel model=laptop

to a file in /etc/modprobe.d/

I'm just hunting out the proper package which could have a quirk added to auto-detect this

For reference, since I mentioned it above, the model quirk (with patch) is filed as Bug# 315977

Is this symptom reproducible with the latest pulseaudio package (0.9.13-2ubuntu5) in jaunty?

That was the version I had when testing, yes. Pulse audio doesn't appear to expose or allow adjustment of arbitrary mixers on the underlying card.

Is there any mechanism by which pulseaudio can reliably expect the various mixer channels it is relying on to be raised?

Have you used the Volume Control applet (see the speaker icon in the notification area)?

In jaunty's current branch of pa, the current state of the mixer levels is used. You can try setting the desired mixer levels directly through `alsamixer -Dhw:0' and then storing the mixer state through `sudo alsactl store'.

Yes, as described in the original post, none of the volume controls (on the Volume control applet) adjusted the PCM channel.

I've worked around it with the manual setting of the mixer in alsamixer, but am curious to know what mechnism should set sensible mixer defaults on a released distro.

(I guess either Pulseaudio needs to ensure the mixer channels required by pulseaudio are brought up, or that the volume control applet exposes the required mixer settings.

Arguably the mixer state should be effected by alsa-utils. Does the alsactl store workaround suffice? Please note that on first boot, if you were not using a necessary quirk, incorrect element strings and values were stored, in which case you would need to remove the asound.state file and forcibly issue a store.

Peter Clifton <email address hidden> wrote:

>Yes, as described in the original post, none of the volume controls (on
>the Volume control applet) adjusted the PCM channel.
>
>I've worked around it with the manual setting of the mixer in alsamixer,
>but am curious to know what mechnism should set sensible mixer defaults
>on a released distro.
>
>(I guess either Pulseaudio needs to ensure the mixer channels required
>by pulseaudio are brought up, or that the volume control applet exposes
>the required mixer settings.
>
>--
>No audio HP 6730b
>https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/315971
>You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
>Audio Team, which is subscribed to pulseaudio in ubuntu.

Yes, the alsactl workaround (and patched kernel) fixes the issue.

Your last comment suggests that it might be useful to compare a description of the saved asound.state (what property knobs it lists), with those from the currently detected card. Whether they are compatible ought to be fairly straightforward to ascertain.

Unfortunately, it is nowhere as straightforward as it may seem, as strings change between releases, as do sane value ranges.

Peter Clifton <email address hidden> wrote:

>Yes, the alsactl workaround (and patched kernel) fixes the issue.
>
>Your last comment suggests that it might be useful to compare a
>description of the saved asound.state (what property knobs it lists),
>with those from the currently detected card. Whether they are compatible
>ought to be fairly straightforward to ascertain.
>
>--
>No audio HP 6730b
>https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/315971
>You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
>Audio Team, which is subscribed to pulseaudio in ubuntu.

Looking at the bug which is now marked as a duplicate of this, Bug #316199, I discovered (which I didn't know before), that you _can_ fix the volume with the gnome panel applet, if you right-click, choose preferences, and adjust the "Master" and "PCM" channels.

Note, that with the "laptop" routing, the required mixer channels are "Master" and "PCM", not "Front" and "PCM".

I presume there is no API to query from Alsa which mixer channels are actually in the "pipeline" between the stream sent by Pulsaudio, and the sound reaching some external hardware?

I might also add that settings made using "alsamixer -Dhw:0" does not persist after reboot. Perhaps related?

(sorry for the duplicate bug)

This turned out to be the root cause of a sound issue I was having. After updating to latest jaunty this morning and manually re-adding "options snd-hda-intel model=mitac" to enable my 82801H [8086:284b] audio chip (bug #210865), I found that alsa had re-muted my Front and other channels.

On reboot sound acted as if it were muted, but I was quite confused that alsamixer showed only a single channel, unmuted and at full volume. (My System/Preferences/Sound applet is missing and I've no idea what happened to it, but that's a separate issue).

I found by killing pulseaudio, I could unmute in alsamixer, restart pulseaudio, and everything worked again. I also tested using alsamixer -c 0 and believe that should do it too.

alsamixer -c 0 is nice to learn about and something I'll definitely keep in my back pocket for future troubleshooting. However, this doesn't seem to be a very discoverable solution to this problem.

See also 274884, which is another one about alsamixer volume settings being "hidden" behind pulseaudio. alsamixer -c 0 addresses that case too, but again is not the most discoverable thing in the world.

Please note that Luke just uploaded a fix for bug 316430.

OK, as Bryce put it "this turned out to be the root cause of a sound issue I was having." For me, I installed gnome-alsamixer and found [ ] Speaker (and [ ] Headphone) turned off. Enabling that, and now my sounds are working.

But this broke for me last week, not weeks ago.

When i use my multimedia keys, i change the master volume. But, i need to change the PCM volume because i have a HDA platform. In Jaunty if I want to use Pulseaudio (not Alsa), I can't select PCM Volume in System=> Pref => Sound.

I'm also affected by this issue, also in Jaunty (x64). Once I'd unmuted the sound controls using gnome-volume-properties, 'sudo alsactl store' didn't work for me; I had to change the permissions on '/var/lib/alsa/asound.state' first (to 0777) before running the 'alsactl store' command as myself, then change the perms back to 0744 when done.

This bug was fixed in the package pulseaudio - 1:0.9.15-3ubuntu1

---------------
pulseaudio (1:0.9.15-3ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  [ Daniel T Chen ]
  * debian/patches/0001_change_resample_and_buffering.patch: Bump
    default resampler to ffmpeg. We cannot peg the cpu, and we cannot
    have audio anomalies, so this change _should_ be regression-free
    but needs extensive testing (LP: #376374).
  * debian/patches/0090_fix_sw_mute_desync.patch: Backport from
    git HEAD to resolve sw vol becoming muted on logout
    (LP: #315971, #352732)

  [ Luke Yelavich ]
  * Merge from Debian unstable, remaining changes:
    - epoch (my stupid fault :S)
    - Don't build against, and create jack package. Jack is not in main
    - use ffmpeg resampler to work better with lack of PREEMPT in jaunty's
      -generic kernel config, also change buffer size
    - Add alsa configuration files to route alsa applications via pulseaudio
    - Move libasound2-plugins from Recommends to Depends
    - Add pm-utils sleep hook to suspend (and resume) users' pulseaudio
      daemons
    - patch to fix source/sink and suspend-on-idle race
    - Make initscript more informative in the default case of per-user
      sessions
    - add status check for system wide pulseaudio instance
    - create /var/run/pulse, and make restart more robust
    - LSB {Required-*,Should-*} should specify hal instead of dbus,
      since hal is required (and already requires dbus)
    - indicate that the system pulseaudio instance is being started from the init
      script
    - Install more upstream man pages
    - Link to pacat for parec man page
    - check whether pulseaudio is running before preloading the padsp library
    - Add DEB_OPT_FLAG = -O3 as per recommendation from
      pulseaudio-discuss/2007-December/001017.html
    - cache /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/ wav files on pulseaudio load
    - disable glitch free (use tsched=0)
    - Generate a PO template on build
    - add special case to disable pulseaudio loading if accessibility/speech
      is being used
    - the esd wrapper script should not load pulseaudio if pulseaudio is being
      used as a system service
    - add a pulseaudio apport hook
    - fix some typos in README.Debian
    - drop padevchooser(Recommends) and pavucontrol (Suggests)
    - drop libasyncns-dev build dependency, its in universe
    - add libudev-dev as a build-dependency

 -- Luke Yelavich <email address hidden> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:47:05 +1000