Howto: Fix low system volume on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid
I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (the Intrepid Ibex) on my laptop. I’m happy to say that the upgrade process from 8.04 to 8.10 went very well. When I first installed 8.04 I created a separate partition for /home (there’s a great howto guide here). This made the upgrade process so incredibly painless.
After spending some time reinstalling some programs, I discovered that PulseAudio finally worked on my laptop. Even though Pulse was included in 8.04, it didn’t work on my laptop and I had to switch everything back to ALSA. I played around with Pulse for a couple of minutes, setting everything up and then I started to notice something strange. Even though my system volume was turned up to 100%, everything still seemed too quiet. I tried changing the device in System > Preferences > Sound, but nothing seemed to help.
Running alsamixer in terminal only showed one mixer track — as it should if PulseAudio was enabled, and this read 100%. After quite a bit of searching I found out what was wrong. It turned out that one of the tracks (front) on the alsa hardware mixer was turned down to about 50%. There’s no way to see this through the gui. The only way to fix this is to run alsamixer in a terminal like this:
$ alsamixer -D hw:0
This will bring up a bunch of bars representing all of the mixer tracks available on the hardware device. After turning all of these up to 100% and exiting alsamixer (press ESC), everything was working perfectly again.
Hopefully this will save someone stuck in a similar situation from a few hours of headbanging.
Thanks – took me a few hours trying other fixes that didn’t work first but am delighted that this one did.
Thank you very much.
You’ve save my life
Thanks alot! worked first time! Ubuntu Rox!!
Man I been stuck on this one for at least a year. I just installed intrepid on a new system and it seemed to be worst then normal. This fixed my problem 100%.
Thanks,
There is some problem with pulseaudio.latest pulseaudio may hopefully fix.
Cheers. Saved a lot of climbing under the desk trying to find whereabouts the hardware volume control is tangled up in the piles of dusty spaghetti.
Thanks a lot! It worked like a charm! I can get back to some headbanging to music atlast!
Thank you very much. Solved my problem with opensuse 11.1 too.
Great ,
helped me a lot ! Even though I had the same problem on Suse Enterprise Desktop.
thanks,
Peter
Thank you! This hack was also needed before I could hear much of anything on a fresh install of karmic.
Men! great job! now i can make a party!
Date: 10/7/09
Time: 18:48
Comin’ at yeh from: Sacramento, CA
Wow, hope you don’t get sick of hearing from the appreciative masses, as I’m among them as of today. Appreciative thanks for pulling my hump from the low-volume malaise it was in.