Volume keyboard shortcut fails to increase volume

This is on dapper, constantly updated.

Thanks for your bug. Does changing the volume with the mixer applet or control work fine?

Yes, only the keyboard-based applet is affected.

Do you have anything to ~/.xsession-errors about that?

No, nothing related showing up in there.

I've already reported this on upstream a little less than a week ago, before I knew about Launchpad. Please don't chew me out too bad.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336783

Thank you for pointing that Philip

I am having this same problem, and i found out what is happening (i think). The volume keys are controlling the pcm function of the card, not the front channel on the card like they should. at least thats my problem, anyone know how to fix this?

angel12: As far as I can tell in GNOME right now, you can't. This is a bug and may or may not already be filed. GNOME uses some magic from ALSA to determine which channel is the "master" channel, so it may also be a bug with your soundcard driver.

This bug refers to the inability to raise the volume, despite lowering it working fine and affecting the correct channel.

Do you still have the issue?

Martin, could that be an alsa issue?

I suffer the same symptoms: Volume hot keys don't change the volume.

I have 2 soundscards, and the hotkey is actually changing the volume for the wrong soundcard! I verified this by opening the mixer application for my 'onboard soundcard', which isn't connected.

the hotkeys should respect ~/.asoundrc for selecting the right 'default' soundcard and not just using the first one in the system.

I believe the problem here is due to poor rounding of floating point values to integers. It is truncated not rounded. This happens when the volume_step is too small - it can never get the volume up to the next notch because it is rounded down back to the current volume. Turning the volume down works because the value gets rounded down.

The gconf key /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/volume_step can be changed to use a different volume step. When I had this set to three (3) I got the same behaviour as repoted in this bug. I set it to zero (which then uses the default value of 6), and I can now increase the volume.

The volume up and down steps are not the same due to the rounding bug, but at least I can change the volume now.

I can confirm the bug with /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/volume_step set to 3 as described by the previous comment

The same problem occurs on Dell Latitude D600 laptop with it's default soundcard. When using Dell's soundlevel changing buttons, nice pop-up shows that sound level should be changed, but nothing happens. Changing sound level from mixer applet also works fine.
Dell Latitude D600 is using Intel AC97 SoundCard.

the same occour to me on a dell inspiron 6000, it seems to me that some volume controls are not tied with master ones, i've to switch to totem application and move the volume control inside the application, the master volume does nothing on pcm volume

this is on edgy (clean install, not upgrade), it worked for me in dapper

Don't know if this is useful, but I have reproduced this bug on both an edgy and dapper system. The volume control works fine, but changes the volume of the non-default onboard sound card rather than an audigy zs. There seems to be no way to swap it.

I also get this, like Jan Haak says, it changes the non default volume. For me, the volume of the sound that i actually hear is "Analog Front", but the keyboard volume keys only change "ICE958 C"

I am running Ubuntu edgy, and i have a Soundblaster Live! 24 bit sound card. It also happened to me on dapper as well.

fixed upstream

That upload fixes the bug:

 control-center (1:2.17.92-0ubuntu1) feisty; urgency=low
 .
   * New upstream version:
     about-me:
     - Change default dir for the image chooser
     - Dont use composite pixbuf to avoid unnecessary clipping
     - Prevent child watcher from accessing already released memory
       (Ubuntu: #86193)
     default applications:
     - Really fix DATADIR
     - Dont try reading into invalid territory when the user set a custom
       command without spaces (Ubuntu: #84715)
     fontilus:
     - Use GOption argument parsing
     keybindings:
     - Clear GConf client cache before reloading
     keyboard:
     - Avoid crashing on NULLs (Ubuntu: #82373)
     settings daemon:
     - Properly round volumes so that volume-up and -down act symetrically
       (Ubuntu: #36302)
     - Dont ignore errors when X refuses to update the pointer mapping
     - Dont install the same filter twice for the default root window
     - Correctly pass the function address when setting up the event filter
     - Fix warnings
     shell:
     - Revert to old menu for 2.18
     theme switcher:
     - Update selected fg color from the correct slot (Ubuntu: #86944)
     - Fix warnings
     - Format guint16 values accordingly
     themus:
     - Populate the VFS file info fields properly so that Nautilus shows, e.g.,
       read-only emblems in themes://
     windows:
     - Remove some long-dead code
     - Dont leak stuff on error
   * debian/capplets-data.install:
     - updated for a directory change
   * debian/patches/90_revert_change_creating_high_cpu_usage.patch:
     - dropped, fixed with the new version
   * debian/patches/91_fix_default_applications_xml_path.patch:
     - dropped, fixed with the new version

Confirmed fixed for Gutsy (tribe 5)

to choose which volume channel the volume multimedia buttons change, you have to go to system > prefs > sound, and at the bottom of the first tab there is a box called 'default mixer tracks', choose the channel that you want to control with the multimedia buttons. and then it works :D