Bug 5925

Here's the fix. Its easy enough, but I'm unsure if there's a way around even needing to do it. Again, my hardware is an Asus G73SW laptop with a realtek card using the Intel HDA drivers.

The fix is:
1) Go into the Mageia control center and disable pulseaudio audio management.
2) Run "alsamixer" in konsole
3) Increase "Bass Speaker" volume to full
4) Go into the Mageia control center and enable pulseaudio audio management.
5) Reboot

You now have your bass speaker at full volume, and to boot it will adjust itself according to system volume automatically. It also mutes itself along with the main speakers when headphones are plugged in (NOTE: This may not be the case with all systems. The same fix in Kubuntu would NOT mute my bass speaker automatically with headphones plugged in, and would be a little strange sounding to say the least).

Note: Bass Speaker has its volume set at "0" by default after install, apparently. This is why this fix is required. Without pulseaudio management disabled, you only see the pulseaudio volume control, and not the individual alsa controls. This may also be why the fix doesn't work in Kubuntu. Kubuntu still has the individual channels present even with Pulseaudio present, which means the bass still control as a secondary volume control. While here in Mageia, we have a single control running all channels when pulseaudio is enabled (which means bass speaker is affected as well, contrary to in Kubuntu)

Hi,

This bug was filed against cauldron, but we do not have cauldron at the moment.

Please report whether this bug is still valid for Mageia 2.

Thanks :)

Cheers,
marja

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

Aye. Bug still exists for Mageia 2 post-install.

Hardware: x86_64 => All
Version: Cauldron => 2

Any word or update on this bug? I'm more than willing to help with fixing it,
but I need to be alerted to any updates on Mageia's end regarding it.

Hi Tyler.

Sorry for not commenting until now - it seems it escaped my attention!

This setup is indeed somewhat odd. Am I right in saying that you have a stereo setup generally, but with an additional bass speaker? i.e. creating a 2.1 setup?

There is no default profile for 2.1 systems - only 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, and 7.1.

There are complications to supporting this. I suspect that the bass is simply synthesised from the stereo (likely just a simple low-pass filter). As the volume controls shown to the user via PA are directly related to the number of channels on the sink, if we are to show things properly, we'd need to create a three channel sink, but as the h/w only accepts two channel input we'd be effectively throwing away the data associated with this third channel. Add to this that it wouldn't fit our general way of working with volumes (use hardware but extend range and granularity in software if needed) it becomes quite hard to support this properly. Really we'd need some kind of "extra" mechanism on top of the classic volume controls to accommodate this. As you may gather from this description, it's not exactly a trivial change.

As we're unlikely to be able to fix it specifically for Mageia, could you open an upstream bug at bugs.freedesktop.org and attach the output of your alsa-info.sh script run? You can download that script from here: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh

Cheers

Col

Sorry for the severe lack of a reply! It's been quite a busy few months. But yes, my laptop has a 2.1 built-in setup. I'll see about posting the bug report over upstream when I have the chance! I can understand why supporting this setup seems to be so...oddball. Thanks for the reply!

(In reply to comment #6)
> Hi Tyler.
> 
> Sorry for not commenting until now - it seems it escaped my attention!
> 
> This setup is indeed somewhat odd. Am I right in saying that you have a stereo
> setup generally, but with an additional bass speaker? i.e. creating a 2.1
> setup?
> 
> There is no default profile for 2.1 systems - only 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, and 7.1.
> 
> There are complications to supporting this. I suspect that the bass is simply
> synthesised from the stereo (likely just a simple low-pass filter). As the
> volume controls shown to the user via PA are directly related to the number of
> channels on the sink, if we are to show things properly, we'd need to create a
> three channel sink, but as the h/w only accepts two channel input we'd be
> effectively throwing away the data associated with this third channel. Add to
> this that it wouldn't fit our general way of working with volumes (use hardware
> but extend range and granularity in software if needed) it becomes quite hard
> to support this properly. Really we'd need some kind of "extra" mechanism on
> top of the classic volume controls to accommodate this. As you may gather from
> this description, it's not exactly a trivial change.
> 
> As we're unlikely to be able to fix it specifically for Mageia, could you open
> an upstream bug at bugs.freedesktop.org and attach the output of your
> alsa-info.sh script run? You can download that script from here:
> http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Col

Assigning to maintainer for status tracking of this upstream bug.

Keywords: (none) => Triaged, UPSTREAM
CC: (none) => stormi
Assignee: bugsquad => mageia
Source RPM: pulseaudio ? => pulseaudio

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Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => OLD