Closed andrewn closed 6 years ago
Do we want to make this optional? ALSA works fine with the stock sound device and the sound mixer works properly.
You can set the volume using pulseaudio-utils
package:
http://terokarvinen.com/2015/volume-control-with-pulseaudio-command-line-tools
@pixelblend My instinct is to settle on one audio system so that we can get proficient using it (including figuring out how to turn the volume down 🤦♂️ ).
If we want our prototypes to have better audio quality then we're immediately standardising on a DAC so this becomes necessary as a default? Not sure though.
Not sure what @libbymiller thinks?
You can set the volume using pulseaudio-utils package: http://terokarvinen.com/2015/volume-control-with-pulseaudio-command-line-tools
pulseaudio-utils
is installed by pulseaudio
so that's good but the volume commands don't seem to have any effect.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ apt-cache show pulseaudio
Package: pulseaudio
Version: 10.0-1+deb9u1
Architecture: armhf
Maintainer: Pulseaudio maintenance team <pkg-pulseaudio-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 5535
Depends: libasound2 (>= 1.0.24.1), libc6 (>= 2.15), libcap2 (>= 1:2.10), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.9.14), libgcc1 (>= 1:3.5), libice6 (>= 1:1.0.0), libltdl7 (>= 2.4.6), liborc-0.4-0 (>= 1:0.4.25), libpulse0 (= 10.0-1+deb9u1), libsm6, libsndfile1 (>= 1.0.20), libsoxr0 (>= 0.1.0), libspeexdsp1 (>= 1.2~beta3.2-1), libstdc++6 (>= 4.3.0), libsystemd0, libtdb1 (>= 1.2.7+git20101214), libudev1 (>= 183), libwebrtc-audio-processing1, libx11-6, libx11-xcb1, libxcb1, libxtst6, adduser, lsb-base (>= 3.2-13), libasound2-plugins, pulseaudio-utils
The default sound system isn't ever going to be acceptable as an actual thing people want to listen to. Asking around, pulseaudio is more modern and therefore maybe a better choice?
I don't have an issue with using Pulseaudio as a default, so long as we're not merging in a buggy implementation. It feels like we're not there yet.
Are we happy with merging fixes into this branch and then merging to master
when it's ready?
We're now using PulseAudio in "system" mode and it seems to be working well for us. It's being installed as a side-effect of speech-dispatcher
but we should install it explicitly.
Pulse Audio seems to be better at working out-of-the-box.
To test this, I disabled the Pi's on-board sound and enabled the Phat DAC in
/boot/config.txt
:I also plugged in a USB microphone.
PulseAudio correctly outputs sound over the DAC and Chromium gets sound from the microphone with no further config necessary. \o/
Default volume is very loud, and you should be able to use
alsamixer
to control this but it doesn't work for me.