alsa mixers
I looked at a number of audio mixers: (I used three audio IFs, an old ens1370, An intel HDA (most common internal audio) and an ICE1712 multitrack card) pavucontrol and kmix: These both control pulseaudio and only affect ALSA settings of any sort through the pulse audio interface. kmix is the the kde version pavucontrol. There is no reason to attempt to make kmix or pavucontrol work without PA running, rather they should stop running gracefully if PA is not there. I would suggest that pavucontrol be the default PA controller for desktop audio that requires it. However, it would make sense to use kmix for the kde meta currently planned. ffado-mixer: This is the only choice for FireWire audio right now. HDSPmixer, echomixer and mudita24: These mixers are designed for specific audio interfaces and are the best mixer to use in these cases. alsamixer: This comes with alsa and runs in the terminal. It only controls alsa. It gives the names alsa uses in its config and is not always easy to understand. Alsamixer also is often confused about what is an input or an output and the same control may show up in both places or be doubled in the same screen. Moving either one of the controls affects the other. PA does a great job of selecting the correct controls. However, when using jackd(bus), input and output levels need to be adjusted at the card. GUI alsa mixers: Interesting thing here. All of them seem to default to the pulse master control. This makes me think that pulse calls itself the default ALSA card(s). (I can't see alsamixer-gui having pulse code in it) xfce4-mixer (aka audio mixer): this is what we ship now. - The toolkit used has sliders of fixed width and so a complex card uses a lot of screen real estate or requires lots of window scrolling to find things. - Fine control is not possible as this mixer steps in 4db steps. Hardly a good deal for setting up a record level for best s/n. It may be that the developer happened to have an audio card with 4db steps as minimum, but many cards allow 2db or less. (some of my controls are .5db steps) - Another annoying bug(feature?) with this mixer is that when the slider is moved to minimum, it auto mutes that channel. Unfortunately, HDA IFs mute more than one channel at a time. They are set up with a speaker level, headphone level and a master. Muting any one of these mutes all of them. So, if I turn the headphone level down to zero, the sound from the speakers vanishes. To get it back, I have to unmute both the master and the speaker channels. alsamixer-gui: This is a very simple GUI in front of the terminal alsa mixer. This one also uses fixed width faders. There is no way to change the device except from the command line at start time. gnome-alsamixer: This one crashed on me, on both machines. It appears to be looking for a sound server and I guess alsa or pulse are not what it considers sound servers. This leaves one to wonder why it might be called an alsa mixer if it doesn't talk to alsa. QASmixer, QASHctl, QASconfig: Added to the seeds for 13.10. - Has variable width faders. This one can fit all the faders for an ice1712 in less than 2/3 of a screen. - Displays both capture and playback channels at the same time as well as switches. - fades in the smallest steps alsa provides for the IF. - allows text entry of a level. - Shows levels in db - Does not allow turning unused/redundant controls display on and off. - QASconfig provides a gui to edit or view the user's current alsa config. - QASHctl provides access to everything alsa can see. This is the only utility that allows me to turn the mic +5v on or off. Volti: someone has done some fixing on this. Last time I used it the faders were very wide. While they don't go as small as qasmixer, they do vary with screen/window size. Does not show mutes or switches, though it does show record/capture enable. Much like xfce4-mixer, but missing some controls and shows playback and capture levels on one screen. In general, The QAS utils give the most control, the nicest display. It looks different from the general system utilities and so the user knows what it is. However, none of them are obvious to use and fit the HW well. They all rely on what alsa tells them about any one control. This what is so nice about HW specific mixers like mudita24. They make sense with the HW. In many ways pulse has done a better job this way. This is because they have HW profiles for different audio interfaces. This what is needed in an ALSA mixer. (Semi)Pro audio recording is really the only place a good mixer is needed, everywhere else, pulse is enough. So there has not been much work on these mixers. We need a new mixer! Lets think about what a dream recording alsa mixer would be like. Then we can think about building it. What controls should be available? what screens should be included? What gui tool kit should be used? I would think basing the ideas on mudita
Re: alsa mixers
On Tue, May 7, 2013 3:15 pm, Len Ovens wrote: Volti: someone has done some fixing on this. Last time I used it the faders were very wide. While they don't go as small as qasmixer, they do Nope, depends on the machine... or really what the most complex audio card on the machine is. On a machine with 30 + faders on one of the sound cards it makes the window wide enough to fit that many faders even if the card it is displaying has less. Pretty much unusable on this machine. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net -- Ubuntu-Studio-devel mailing list Ubuntu-Studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: alsa mixers
On Tue, May 7, 2013 7:08 pm, lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: Volti has another feature: you get both the mixer and the tray applet, givng all the features of the default GNOME sound applet with a far better mixer, The default gnome sound applet must be truly abysmal. On Volti I have 10 channels with two faders all with the same label... some of them are off the screen at any one time so I can't even count to find out which is which. and working fine with ALSA by itself, with Jack not running and PA not running/not installed. xfce4-mixer works fine this way as well as does qasmixer, while fitting on one screen. Evejn the media sound up/down keys work, though they are press and hold rather than multi-press, which is a little counterintuitive. You will hear the sound level change and see the tray applet reflect the change, though GNOME's overlay won't open to show it. That is hardly a requirement for setting input levels, which is the major use for an alsa mixer. Handy for desktop audio though... which is what pulse is for. desktop audio can be made to work without pulse, but in that case xfce4-mixer can do these things too. (and worked the last time I tried) Haven't tested controlling either through it, but I would imagine the master (which the tray applet controls, set it in preferences if it does not) would control ALSA's output just fine with no mattter what is using the sound card, PA or Jack included. except if you are using something like an ice1712 based audio card, in which case it can be set to control either the left or the right channel but not both. (Pulse has a HW specific profile just to make this work) The onboard sound on my motherboard does give a wide mixer window, but you can slide it off the left or right of the screen. No matter how wide it is, you can therefore get to everything. Two and a half screens worth is a bit much... Thats how wide the window is on this machine (remember over 30 faders). You have to move the window carefully or you end up pushing it onto the next workspace :P In my opinion, this alone makes the application broken. The only real quirks are that you have to drop a script in one of the autostart directories to start Volti at login, and you can quit it from the bottom of 4 options on the right click menu on the applet. That could confuse a new user who might accidently quit their volume control and not know how to restart it (from terminal or from run dialog). XFCE would have no problem starting it at login, there is a settings dialog for that. I expect the user would only exit it once before learning not to do that :) however it does go in the menu and is not hard to find. For a pretty GUI around alsamixer, alsamixergui is still out there, I've Ya... but in many ways it is actually harder to use than alsamixer in a terminal. Having to restart to change audio card is not nice either. kept it installed since my first audio editing machines for old time's sake. Smaller sliders, shows EVERYTHING by default. Works no matter what happens to any other program, so long as ALSA is available. When I was last using pulseaudio, it's claim on the soundcard made alsamixergui show only the master slider, don't know if that's still the case when running PA. when pulse is running, it seems to create a fake alsa audio card and makes it default. So any alsa mixer (except alsamixer) seems to load that card by default. This is so Pulse can replace alsa for those programs that that only know how to talk with alsa and so that when pulse is not there, the same app will just work with alsa. Volti would be good for most HDA sound apps, I think, but once we start adding the kinds of cards that many of the ubuntustudio users have, it becomes a problem. The problem in many ways is that alsa is not made for as wide a range of cards as there are. some of the alsa drivers that have non-standard features have named them whatever seemed right to the dev at the time. Then the same feature on another card may have been named something else. What does a mixer do with that? A mixer app with profiles would be the best thing. The profile would decide which faders appeared and what they are named. It would decide if a control was input or output. (right now alsa offers both an input and an output fader for both my ADCs and my DACS... 16 faders for 4 channels) I have an old ensoniq... the inputs come with one fader, but that fader can be controlled as the input level with input enable or as an output with mute. But the output has to be unmuted before the input can be enabled... except the mic where the input can be enabled with output muted... but the output level still follows the input level. I would think that a mixer with user settable profiles, where the collection of profiles could be built up over time by users who had the cards would be the best way of doing this. I would like to see all the controls and switches available in this case. I would like to
