Ubuntu Multimedia :: Why Is Sound Volume So Much Lower Than Windows
May 20, 2010
This is my third Ubuntu installation, and even with identical hardware, sound volume is dramatically less than under Windows. I turn every slider up all the way, and it is still less than half as loud as Windows.
I just recently installed ubuntu so I'm quite lost on some stuff. This little annoyance comes from the volume levels in Ubuntu 10.04. I have partitioned my computer to have dual boot into windows and ubuntu, so I know the problems are not related to the hardware itself as everything works just fine in windows. I am using a Dell Inspiron 9400, for reference.
The multimedia keys on the computer respond correctly but on the lower three volume settings sound completely drops out as if I had muted the computer. I went into the Alsa mixer to see if I could configure these sound levels and sure enough the master volume was down to zero, PCM and LFE are also low . I changed the settings of the lower levels but when I press on the volume up or down media keys to switch level the settings get reset. I tried just changing one level, exiting and saving through alsactl but it didn't stick. Even after reboot the settings are back to the zero volume on the first levels.
I have a keyboard with media buttons on it which work fine. I do have a question about the 2 buttons for lower and higher volume. Pressing the higher volume button increases the volume with a maximum of 18 steps, where step 0 = mute and step 17 is maximum. I wonder if it is possible to increase the number of steps to make the volume change not so big per step. Now I have one step which is a bit too loud, and one step lower is not loud enough.
I am running Ubuntu 10.04 on a Sony Vaio EC laptop. I am having problems with my volume being very low under Ubuntu, even if I turn all the options to full, I can barely hear it. This happens both through the built in speakers and through headphones. I know it is not a hardware problem since both work fine in Win7 dual boot. Also, this problem occurs both in Rhythmbox and chromium.
I had a problem with sound, but after googling and installing a couple of files, I finally got sound from ..... and in aqualung. However, still nothing from audacious or amarok. When I open them with a terminal, there are no error messages. In audacious, the visuals show that the song is playing...the volume is at 100%, but no sound. Same with amarok.
my sound has been only turning on if i turn it up beyond about 10%. it didnt used to do this. This has been happening for quite a long time, i just now wanted to bring it to the forum.
I recently purchased an external USB audio card [URL] All worked fine except the volume that comes out is BLASTING, and changing the master volume does nothing. Individual applications let me change their volume, but this is extremely anoying and often leads to me accidently blasting the room.
When the opening little music plays during start up, the first half of it is loud, but halfway through, the sound cuts to about half volume. Everything else afterwards is also very quiet. After boosting the volume output to 150%, and boosting VLC's audio output to 200%, the audio is still barely audible on my laptop. I've gone into alsamixer, and it's at max. I once found how to reset the audio card, and the sound was normal again, but only until I shut the laptop off, and next time, it was the same as always.
I'm on Ubuntu 9.10, and using an old Toshiba Satellite laptop. Don't know what my sound card is.
Since a few days my audio volume adjusts itself while listening music (rythmbox) or watching a movie (vlc). Anyone else have these problems? It's really really annoying.
My system:
Ubuntu 10.04, 64 bit on intel i5 sound card: VIA VT1828S (onboard Asus P7P55D-E mainboard)
Upgraded via Update Manager from 9.10 sound-previously-working-just-fine-system. Now, for example, running any audio-producing app (Rythmbox is a good example but its the same for anything including out of a VirtualBox XP install or with MythBuntu): The main volume control functions, but goes from muted to full volume in just 4 steps; raising it higher has no effect. It gets stranger: in Alsamixer or gnome-alsa-mixer I can see that lowering the desktop volume control to mute causes Master, PCM, Front, Surround, Center, LFE, and Side all to go to zero. Raising the desktop control one step causes all of these but Front to go to 100% instantly. Increasing the desktop control by a few more steps causes Front to step to 100%, after which no further volume increase is perceived. It's as if each step in the desktop volume equals some 25% of the Front setting, and 100% of the others. The audio setting in System, Preferences, Sound, Hardware is "Analog Stereo Output."
If I click 'Mute' on Master in the mixer then all the speakers mute, but unmuting Master does not unmute anything else. Only after I move and release the mouse-down state from the master volume do the other channels unmute. The volume control in Rythmbox, on the other hand, works seemingly correctly (maybe its going thru Pulseaudio?) And as an aside, why are there no controls for Pulse if it sits on top of ALSA?
I'm really confused by this, as all of it work as "expected" while running 9.10. Here is some output from this system (an ASUS M4A78T-E):
I've got a Toshiba L650, Debian testing/unstable, KDE4.4.5. The sound worked when I first installed everything (played a movie in dragon player, etc), but shortly thereafter it stopped working. It seems like the hardware is okay (all hardware is recognized, all relevant modules loaded, volume in alsamixer at 100%, the system beep -- set in the BIOS -- works), but I still can't get sound to play. Once or twice, right before KDE shutdown, I could hear the exit sound, but that's it. Last night I exited KDE (without hearing a sound), shutdown kdm, then:
mv $HOME $HOME.backup mkdir $HOME and restarted kdm and kde...still no sound! I created another user, and still no sound!
I use headphones and have an MCP73 sound device; am running OpenSUSE 11.4.
On each restart, I get no sound. I have to go to YAST, Hardware, Sound, Other, Volume. The 'Other channels', Front slider is at 0%. If I slide it up to 100%, my headphones start working. At this point the Help text says to press 'Next' to save the settings, but there isn't a 'Next' button...just a Cancel and OK. OK keeps the new setting, but apparently doesn't save it permanently.
What can I do to avoid having to reset this slider every time ?
Does anybody know if it's possible to get the volume control knob (the one on the device) on the USB Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi device in Ubuntu 10.4? The sound is working great for me, but I actually bought it mostly for the volume so I'm hoping there's a way to fix it before I return it.
I'm not able to hear any sounds from my system. The panel does not have the volume control button anymore. I'm not able to run System -> Preferences -> Sound. I get an error saying "Waiting for sound system to respond" And if I run 'pavucontrol' in the terminal, I get "Connection failed: Connection refused"
Also recently I've noticed that when I run some commands in the terminal I often get this message "Home directory /root not ours." Can this be related to the sound problem? I am on the system as root.
Basically every time I boot into Ubuntu any sound will be vary loud until I move the volume slider, it doesn't matter how much I move the slider as long as it moves then all sound will play at the normal volume and volume control works like it's suppose too until I reboot. This problem started in 9.10 and still happens in 10.04 and 10.10(as of a couple days ago).As far as I can tell the issue only exists in Ubuntu, doesn't happen in Fedora(Gnome), OpenSuSE(KDE) or Kubuntu.Running 10.04.1 32-bit, Logitech Clear Chat USB Headset, don't have any speakers.
Recently I installed JACK and Ardour to try out. Later I decided against it and so I uninstalled them. After restarting my computer, I noticed that the sound applet has disappeared from the panel, although the battery and mail icons are still present. There is still sound coming out of my laptop speakers, but it is stuck at whatever volume I had it set on before the last time I shut down. Volume sliders inside Banshee and suchll function, but I cannot change the overall system volume, and my keyboard shortcuts for this have stopped working as well. When I go into System->Preferences->Sound, all I get is a message that says "Waiting for sound system to respond." and nothing happens. I've tried searching around for a solution, but nobody I could find seems to have had aimilar problem, and none of the various other solutions proposed have worked for me. I'm on Ubuntu 10.10 by the way.
i'm using opensuse 11.3 64bits and upgraded kde from 4.4.4 to 4.6.0 now i'm having some problems with audio. it seems kde have problems with audio-devices. sometime i message about none workin devices and ask me to remove it. i manage to get sound from amarok, but not from web-browser lika videos. the computer is a dell latitude d830 with intel hda-devices. computer is docked in a dell d-dock. i can't adjust master volume using computer buttons or kde-volume, so i have to use volume on external speakers.
I have a new Dell XPS 9100 with 9GB ram and ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5. I installed a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 64bit. Sound worked fine withthe Windows 7, but no sound with Ubuntu. Did a reinstall with just Ubuntu 64 bit (wiping out the Windows 7). No sound.I first did:
System -> Administration->System Testing (testing only for sound). I get: 0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
Its really annoying I don't have a monitor I just use VNC and putty to control my computer and when ever I vnc in and hit d all the windows minimize I tried deleting everything under .gnome2,.nautilus,.gconf and nothing. I love Ubuntu but this upgrade has been nothing but problems. I did a complete reformat and its a huge pita. its problem after problem never had this with 10.04
I tried to add my wife , and when I put in a password for her, this error comes up."Please set a valid user name consisting of a lower case letter followed by lower case letters and numbers." I did all that and I still can't set a password for her.
I've got my xubuntu 10.10 install just about perfect on a little acer aspire d250, apart from a small sound useability issue: In the interests of simplicity and resource usage I removed pulseaudio. After a bit of fiddling I got it so that my USB soundcard (ProDac) is recognized and automatically set as the default soundcard when plugged in. Any sound applications automatically use the USB sound if it present, no need to around with pulse. The only problem is that my netbook's volume control keys still only control the master volume of the inbuilt soundcard, and have no effect on the usb sound. Does anyone know of a way to change which sound device these keys actually effect? I'd like to write a little script so that when the usb device is detected the keys are remapped.
I'm running Kubuntu 10.10 32 bit on an old DFI KT600AL motherboard based system using the onboard VIA 3058 AC97 audio (because it supports front panel audio connections and none of the add-in PCI soundcards I have do). I have an old Gateway/STB TVPCI TV tuner card (mainly wanted the FM radio part to work) hooked up to the cd audio connector on the motherboard because the digital audio over the pci bus apparently isn't supported for this card (neither is the onboard analog mixer on the tv tuner card, I had to hack a CD-ROM audio cable and solder it to the audio outputs of the tv tuner module on the TV tuner card). When I use the master channel as the master channel (selected in Kmix) then as one would expect it affects the output volume of all other audio playing on the system except that which is being handled by the PCM channel. On Windows the PCM channel was also affected by the "Volume Control" slider such that ALL volume levels were reduced when moving the slider. I'm hoping someone can help me figure out how to make it work like this on Kubuntu.
First off I should warn you that I (like many users of older hardware that is not properly supported under PulseAudio) have uninstalled PulseAudio (because it's garbage) and am using Alsa to manage my audio hardware. I would think that there would be some way to do this using the 'amixer' application to add the PCM channel as a component of the 'Master' channel so that when the volume is turned down using the 'Master' channel control it will affect the PCM channel too (at least the output to the speaker jack, not necessarily the capture or mix volume though), but I'm not really any good at doing things from a terminal window and the options for the amixer command kind of confused me.
I used Ubuntu 10.10 (64 bit) on IMac i7. As far as, I remember, after installing Pulse-Audio Equalizer, for each restart of the system, after login screen, system sets volume to maximum value. What can I do?
since using 10.04 I have a big problem with my usb headset (freetalk everyman)
1. Problem: I cannot regulate the volume of the phones (output) anymore with gnome-volume-control. By default the volume is set to 100% which is way too loud. When I set it under 100% there is no sound at all. Values over 100% work.
2. Problem: The X server is freezing iregulary when I connect the headset and disconnect it, Magic SysRq works. I checked Xorg.0.log and found out that it recognizes the usb headset as keyboard:
I am struggling with a problem with the volume control... when i try to adjust the volume with the sliding bar i can not do it. If i put the scrollbar to the 0 position, it is muted. when i move it to anywhere else, i get the full volume. From other programs like vlc, i can adjust the volume with no problem.
My volume control seems to have only three settings: TOO LOUD, VERY QUIET, OFF. If I adjust the Master volume slider from the Panel, only about the right 1/8th has any effect and if I slide it past about the 95% mark, I get no sound at all. At the far-right end of the volume control, I get total volume. It's basically like the slider only has any impact in the top 5% of it's space. Below 95% of the slide, there is zero volume.
It's so drastic, that one tap down of the volume button on my keyboard kills the sound (because it nudges the slider past that 95% mark). This happens in the Audio settings, etc., system-wide. If I adjust the volume for an individual app from within the app (MPlayer, for example) it behaves exactly as expected (that is, app volume works smoothly, it's just master volume that has this issue). I have run through most of the "obvious" things-- I'm wondering if I broke something by installing the extra KDE packages to get Amarok to work.
I'm running squeeze (last updated today), and everything has been working great. There is only thing that would simplify my life minutely..Anybody know how can I have the volume buttons on my laptop change the "pcm" channel volume rather than "master"? If they could control pcm, then I could adjust the volume coming out of my headphones or my computer speaker (both controlled by pcm, but not master...seems strange to me) with just one click.I tried to find this info online, but all results seem to refer to an older version. The simple "click here, set this" solution no longer is possible.
Debian Squeeze 6.0.0 on a Thinkpad T43, sound volume is not synchronized between the laptop volume buttons and GNOME's Volume Applet. So if I turn the volume all the way down with the physical buttons, the volume applet may still indicate 75%.I did not have this problem in Debian Lenny. Pressing the volume buttons used to show a volume bar on the screen, as did pressing the mute button.
recently downloaded banshee and found it pretty useful. however in the notes for the latest release it says that there is an option to have the cover artin the lower left hand corner. i can't figure out how to get to work at all. i have ubuntu 9.10 and Banshe1.6 Beta 2.would anyone have ideas please? i've spent a couple of hours on this and theres nothing on the net.