I installed Fedora-9 (from the KDE Live CD) on a big new disk on my laptop (ThinkPad T43) yesterday, and found that sound was not working. I noticed on left-clicking on the sound icon in the panel that the sound mixer was muted, and the sound was set at minimal level as well. Why? Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
Anyway, after unmuting the sound and increasing the level I found there was still no sound.
Left-clicking on the sound icon, and then left clicking on the word "Mixer" in the small window that appeared brought up a KMix window. I noticed that the "Front" slider was set at the minimal level in this, and pushing it up started sound working.
What exactly does "Front" mean?
Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication. As far as I can see, all I can do under Windows is make the sound stronger or weaker. I must say that is all I want.
Am I alone in feeling there is too much expertise, and not enough common sense, in the Linux sound community?
On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 16:20 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
What exactly does "Front" mean?
If you have multi-channel sound, then that's either the front-centre channel volume, or an overall front speakers volume. But I highly doubt it'd be the second.
left centre right front front front
you
left right rear rear
and, somewhere, a sub-woofer
Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication.
Hmmph, try setting up multichannel audio on XP, and you'll find out it can be a complete mess.
In either case, Windows or Linux, some multi-channel cards can be operated in different modes (multi-channel, or just two-channel), and that'll affect which volume control does what if they re-arrange the order of the channels. It also affects what connectors do what, on many there's not enough sockets for everything. So you lose microphone and line inputs to become rear channel outputs, etc.
Computer audio hardware is a crock. Even the manufacturers make a mess of it when supplying their own software to run their hardware. It's no wonder that outsiders don't get it right, either.
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
I installed Fedora-9 (from the KDE Live CD) on a big new disk on my laptop (ThinkPad T43) yesterday, and found that sound was not working. I noticed on left-clicking on the sound icon in the panel that the sound mixer was muted, and the sound was set at minimal level as well. Why? Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums. Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.
Anyway, after unmuting the sound and increasing the level I found there was still no sound.
I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well. Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something like that)
Left-clicking on the sound icon, and then left clicking on the word "Mixer" in the small window that appeared brought up a KMix window. I noticed that the "Front" slider was set at the minimal level in this, and pushing it up started sound working.
What exactly does "Front" mean?
Windows XP seems to get by without all this sophistication. As far as I can see, all I can do under Windows is make the sound stronger or weaker. I must say that is all I want.
Am I alone in feeling there is too much expertise, and not enough common sense, in the Linux sound community?
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
max bianco wrote:
Surely the rational setup would be to have sound working at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums. Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.
Windows doesn't seem to worry about that. As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker - I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.
I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well. Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something like that)
I'm using KDE, and don't see any setting like this in the main menu. The only sound application there is KMix, which does not seem to offer anything along those lines.
The only other application that I can see to control sound is System Settings=>Sound and I don't see anything similar there either.
(Incidentally, I would have thought the default was always ALSA - what else could it be?)
--- On Fri, 7/4/08, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
From: Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net Subject: Re: Does one have to be a sound engineer? To: fedora-list@redhat.com Date: Friday, July 4, 2008, 10:54 AM max bianco wrote:
Surely the rational setup would be to have sound
working
at a reasonably high level when one logs on?
I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or
your ear drums.
Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.
Windows doesn't seem to worry about that. As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker - I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.
I had to switch my default to ALSA and all was well. Preferences-->Hardware-->Sound ( or something
like that)
I'm using KDE, and don't see any setting like this in the main menu. The only sound application there is KMix, which does not seem to offer anything along those lines.
The only other application that I can see to control sound is System Settings=>Sound and I don't see anything similar there either.
(Incidentally, I would have thought the default was always ALSA - what else could it be?)
It was arts for KDE and esound for Gnome prior to PulseAudio. Now it is PulseAudio.
--
max bianco:
I think the reasoning is not breaking the hardware or your ear drums. Blowing speakers is relatively easy to do.
Timothy Murphy:
Windows doesn't seem to worry about that. As it happens, I am using the laptop speaker - I doubt if this has ever deafened anyone.
Try using powered speakers with no volume control on them (some JBL speakers that came with a Compaq monitor, long ago), they depend on your mixer to completely control levels. They go damn loud when driven with full audio levels.
A proper use of a volume control would be that a high level (on your control position) is relative to very loud audio. That's not a good default.