31 Mar
2019
31 Mar
'19
1:41 a.m.
On 3/26/19 8:02 PM, Tim wrote:
About mixers: I get why Pulse Audio Volume tray (and
Windows)
and the Pulse Audio configuration want to show just what's
relevant for day-to-day operations. It works well.
But... to this day I still don't see any hardware volume controls
when I click my PAV mixer icon or go into Configure Audio Volume,
at least on my KDE distro.
I don't understand why they don't include KMixer or something,
which last time I checked was fairly capable of listing ALL the
ALSA controls on my ice1712 delta-1010. That's a lot of 'em.
Or why not integrate HW controls into Pulse?
I don't understand why they don't expose them since Pulse
already works pretty close to hardware level, no?
Hey OP with 1818vsl: I see the device is supposed to work with ALSA.
If you have a desktop with a mixer icon, when you click it does
it let you see those very volume controls that affected you?
No?
(First, apologies to Fons for the misquote, you are right.)
Hey guys! I just spent two hours researching mixers.
What a lousy state of affairs.
If it's true a user had trouble because of some hardware volumes
being zero and/or not visible in a mixer and/or non-adjustable,
it kinda makes me sad, I hate to see things fail like that.
Remember when the broken alsa mixer gui was the only gui solution?
When I contributed patches to the SoundBlaster Live! kernel module,
and very heavy patches to the busted support applications
(for loading the DSP with your own programs on gui canvas etc.)
there was one more piece of the puzzle I needed: An ALSA mixer
that could handle dynamically created/destroyed ALSA controls
which the SB DSP could actually cause. No gui mixer handled this.
So I found an fledgling one, I think called QasMixer, and proceeded
to add the missing functionality. Code sits somewhere here.
Fast forward a year or two and finally mixers started to show
everything. I recall after a distro update I think KMixer
was very cool. I clicked the new mixer and said yeah,
that's it they've finally come around.
So tonight I read this blog:
https://fitzcarraldoblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/nostalgia-for-those-alsa-…
He shares my nostalgia, for sure. Lo and behold I see he mentions
a trick to get the modern KMix to show ALSA *not* Pulse, and how
to make it permanent.
"export KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 && kmix"
But... unfortunately it's either Pulse or ALSA, not both at
the same time in KMix. What the heck? A hidden export?
So as a /general/ mixer I heartily recommend recent QasMixer to
any KDE/Qt fans. Yeah, it's still active and pretty cool. Qt5 now.
I don't think there's anything like it. Is there? Try it and tell me
if you agree. I think this topic is important - one of the most
important to a Linux user, look what may have happened to the OP here.
QasMixer might be important. Don't let it... fade.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/qastools/
Thanks.
Tim.