Very quiet sound in Ubnutu 9.04

[Zak Jones!]

Alright, I posted a couple days ago about how all my hardware was malfunctioning. I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04, and all my sound and video issues were solved. :)

Just a minor little bug though. I googled it for a while, can't find anything relevant.

I was wondering: All the sounds played are really quiet, even at max volume. I like to have my music a little loud, so how do I get it to play louder?

Thanks. :)

Distro: Ubuntu 9.04
Motherboard: ASUS P5QL PRO

[saikee]

Not really an answer but you won't get much sound out of a PC-powered audio, about a couple of watts. With external speakers powered independently then the sound will be amplified and come out in a much better quality and a lot louder.

[i845_]

Open the volume control dialog, and crank up the Line Out slider to the max.

[leonpmu]

Hi there Zak, sorry, I haven't looked at your other post... do you have an ATI sound card?

I have a friend of mine experienceing the same problem where sound is so soft it's almost inaudible, seems to be a quirk with the sound driver for the ATI AC97u cards, bte my frind is using PCLinux 2007

[i845_]

ATI makes sound cards?

BTW, the sound chip Zak has is a Realtek ALC1200.

[TheCatMan]

Does the ALC1200 have more than one output (DSP) device? If so, using an alternate one might help. I'm a bit out of date on Ubuntu but you would normally get a choice of Alsa outputs, e.g. hw:0,0 vs hw:0,1, which your sound programs should let you select.

Like leonpmu's friend, I have an on-board AC97 sound card that's always been a bit quiet. I've read that these cards have a screwy set-up where what looks like the default dsp device (1,0) is actually intended to be used for the 3rd & 4th channels in surround-sound mode, and if you use it 'normally' you get poor sound with a lot of background noise. Using the second device is supposed to cure it.

I only learned this recently while trawling myriad ALSA sites for a completely different reason, and I haven't tried it yet as I normally use another sound card - but it might be worth a shot.

[Zak Jones!]

Quick reply before school:

There is no line out channel to crank up, but I did instead turn all the channels that have to do with output to the max. No fix.

CatMan, there are 5 output jacks (for surround sound) on the back of my motherboard. I think I've tried them all without any success. I'm using the 'front' channel now.

[ph34r]

I've noticed that when I run XMMS and play with the volume in it that it affects all my other volume settings as well.

So XMMS is to the max, *then* I use the speaker applet thingie to lower it...

[i845_]

Okay, there are a few solutions I can suggest. If these don't work, I don't know what will!

a. Open a terminal session, and execute alsamixer. Now experiment with volume levels till a satisfactory result is obtained.
b. Try checking if Ubuntu is sending the sound over the S/PDIF ports, instead of the analog audio ports (unlikely, since that would (usually) result in no sound at all from the analog ports.)
c. Try the driver from the Realtek website (this is suicide; strongly recommended against!)
d. Check out these pages that I've dug up: (link (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=939198)) (link (http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=974481)) (link (http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=881363)) (link (http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=203389)) (link (http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201553)).

Does the ALC1200 have more than one output (DSP) device? If so, using an alternate one might help. I'm a bit out of date on Ubuntu but you would normally get a choice of Alsa outputs, e.g. hw:0,0 vs hw:0,1, which your sound programs should let you select.

CatMan, there are 5 output jacks (for surround sound) on the back of my motherboard. I think I've tried them all without any success. I'm using the front channel now.

@Zak

TheCatMan isn't probably telling you about jacks. ALSA addresses your audio device by different names based on its functional characteristics. For instance, hw:0,0 may represent the analog output interface, hw:0,1, the digital output interface, hw:0,2, the capture interface, and so on.

Cheers!

[Zak Jones!]

Ah, man, I swear I posted a reply earlier. It went something like this:

K, I ran alsamixer and put all output channels to max, which didn't really help at all. I noted though, that when the Master channel was at max, the dB gain was +0. Of course, anything less than max is a negative gain. I'm not sure what's up with that. Could I perhaps, modify alsamixer to give me a +12 or even +24 dB gain? Just wondering.

I have no idea how to check where Ubuntu is sending sound.

Thanks for helping!

[Zak Jones!]

Looking through the links provided by i845_, I found this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6125344&postcount=23

The poster suggests adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1


That looks quite promising. I just don't have permissions to save the file. I don't know how to log in as root, or to save the file with sudo through the command line. Help meeee.. :p

**EDIT**

I opened gedit through the terminal with sudo, and that let me save the file. I modified the file as suggested, but I'm not sure if it helped or not... I don't think it's much louder, if at all. Any other suggestions?

[mrrangerman43]

Open a terminal window and if you are part of the sudoer you would type something like this if you were using the pico editor, sudo pico /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base then you will be prompt for your passwd. Then add what you need to add save it then restart alsa.
Or you can just su give your root passwd then the command pico /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base edit the file. Just replace the word pico with what ever editor you like using. I'm not sure what default editor suse uses. The part you will add to should be at the bottom of the file with the other options.

[bwkaz]

I modified the file as suggested, but I'm not sure if it helped or not... I don't think it's much louder, if at all. Any other suggestions? Have you reloaded the module since you changed the file?

That file only affects the default parameters that get sent to the module when it does get loaded; it doesn't affect anything immediately. The module will be reloaded when you reboot, so if you've done that, then this isn't applicable. You can also force it to be reloaded with:

sudo modprobe -r snd-hda-intel && sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel

This is actually two commands, but the second won't run unless the first is successful (which is what I got from using && between them). If the module can't be removed for some reason, it's better to avoid trying to re-add it. :)

(I'm unsure what the alsa-base file contains, so I'm not sure what -- if anything -- would be required after editing it...)

[TheCatMan]

TheCatMan isn't probably telling you about jacks. ALSA addresses your audio device by different names based on its functional characteristics. For instance, hw:0,0 may represent the analog output interface, hw:0,1, the digital output interface, hw:0,2, the capture interface, and so on.



Yep, that's what I was on about. There's a better explanation than mine here (http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Via8233) - see the entries about poor sound quality part way down. It's talking about a different sound card than yours though, so not everything will apply.

[Zak Jones!]

Oh, man, I am not being a very responsible host here. Sorry, I've been busy with stuff.

When I use headphones, I can turn them up louder than the speakers (when they're, for example, off of my head and on the desk, I can get them to play louder than my speakers). So I guess that counts as a workaround...?

Still though! I hate these headphones. They always fall off because of my hair.

I'd really like to find a resolution to this. I still think the issue and the solution both lie with the dB gain in alsamixer. If you'll remember, the dB gain was +0 when some of the channels, notably the master channel, were at maximum. There has to be some way that I can change that, right? Like, define 50% volume to be a +0dB gain and 100% to be a +24dB gain? That's possible, right? *crosses fingers*

[TheCatMan]

Sorry I can't answer that question, I thought +0 as maximum was normal but I'm no expert. HOWEVER I just thought of something completely different: Your music software might not be outputting directly to ALSA.

I'll explain: Ubuntu comes with PulseAudio, which it uses by default. Pulseaudio is a sound server that sits between your sound software and ALSA. Depending on your setup, your sound players would send their output to Pulse, which then mixes it and sends it on to the sound card.

Just to make matters more confusing, Pulse can be configured to look like an ALSA sound device, but let's not go there yet...

The point is that Pulse has its own volume controls, which are completely independant of the ALSA volume controls. So, you can have your sound card turned up all the way and still only get a whisper if Pulse is set at 40%. Or you can set Pulse to 100% and hear nothing if ALSA is set too low.

In my Mandriva setup, the KDE volume control only sets the ALSA volume and I have to open up the Pulse mixer (pavucontrol) to set the volume there - which is a pain, but there we go. It may be that Ubuntu does it differently, but you should be able to find out by running alsamixer (which you've already done) and pavucontrol, and playing with the volume controls on both. If that doesn't help try this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5931543

[Zak Jones!]

K, what you're saying makes sense, so no problems with that.

So, trying to run pavucontrol in a terminal (after wasting a couple seconds trying to figure out why it wasn't working in a new Firefox tab. wtf?) results in the terminal telling me that I don't have it installed.

Should I install it? :p

[Zak Jones!]

Alright, well, I installed it anyways. All the channels it has control over and everything are already set to 100%. : /

I think we're running out of ideas here. *sigh*

[chenxiaolong]

The post by "Zak Jones!" had an incorrect path, which is why it didn't work. The modprobe daemon ONLY looks for files ending with *.conf in /etc/modprobe.d. So you should add "options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1" to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. I hope this works for you.