[PlanetCCRMA] Alsamixer question

[nigel henry]

Hi Bill. In addition to David's reply, if you are using KDE it may be worth 
considering the following. KDE has it's own mixer, with the ability to save 
settings. To access this, go to. control centre/sound & multimedia/mixer . 
Here you will find an entry "Load volumes on login" with a checkbox to the 
left. Uncheck it if it's checked, then apply, and close the control centre. 
This is on FC1 & FC2 . I havn't got FC3 & FC4 and I know that later versions 
of KDE have removed the mixer from the control centre subsection for sound & 
multimedia. The only distro that I've got KDE 3.4 on is Gentoo. Here if you 
open Kmix, you'll find it has menu items on it. Go to settings.configure 
Kmix, and you'll find the "Load volumes on login" with it's checkbox here. 
Again uncheck it, apply, then ok. Moving on. Set up Alsamixer how you want 
it, you probably won't need to do an alsactl store, as these settings should 
be stored automatically on shutdown. In fact they probably have been stored 
already by alsactl, but KDE's mixer was resetting the Alsamixer to the 
settings that Alsamixer was originally set to as default.

I may be wrong, and am happy to be corrected, but what would appear to be the 
scenario is this.  When you originally install Alsa, often the mixer has some 
items muted, and/or some controls set to zero. KDE if the "load volumes at 
login" is checked, stores these. You then set up Alsamixer, unmuting, and 
setting the controls as you want them. Bear in mind that KDE's mixer has got 
the original settings still. You shut down the machine, and alsactl remembers 
you're newly set up Alsamixer. You then boot you're machine up, and alsactl 
restores the settings to Alsamixer during the bootup. These are you're 
settings as you wanted them. But, and this is the big BUT. You now login to 
KDE, and KDE's mixer changes them to what was originally stored as default 
when you first installed Alsa. It is probably not a good idea that KDE has 
this "load volumes at login" checked as default, and does cause a lot of 
confusion as to why alsactl does not appear to be restoring Alsamixers 
settings. I hope this may be of some help with your problem. Nigel.





On Thursday 25 Aug 2005 3:03 am, Bill Bain wrote:
> OK, so I finally got the onboard sound playing (at
> least CDs anyway).  Who'd thunk that alsamixer would
> default to having everything muted?  Now my question
> is how to get alsamixer to retain the settings? I
>
> can't find alsactl:
> >[bbain@localhost ~]$ alsactl store
> >bash: alsactl: command not found
>
> Sorry to consume bandwidth, but what am I missing?
>
> Bill
>
>
>
>
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