Gadgetoid
commented
7 years ago This is necessary to get Speaker pHAT working reliably irrespective of your configuration. That said, it doesn't break onboard audio, it disables it.
Disabling the Volume control is also necessary, since it only works with the onboard audio and does some hacky things that will break the pHAT setup. You should still be able to control volume via alsamixer. We're unfortunately at odds with the objectives and priorities of the Pixel maintainers over this, although we're looking into ways to configure out way around it.
For the time being, you can edit /boot/config.txt and make sure to uncomment dtparam=audio=on which should re-enable the onboard audio, however you may need to also modify other configuration to actually use it. Switching between audio devices is a bit of a kerfuffle, which is why we currently disable it outright.
Volume ALSA tries to be helpful in this respect, but very naively creates an ~/.asoundrc that directly sets the DAC as the default output for the current active user. This sounds fine- but that means the software volume control and VU Meter configuration we've painstakingly crafted is just bypassed.
So at the moment you can have:
- Onboard audio enabled and switchable audio via Volume ALSA but no volume control on the Speaker/DAC
- Onboard audio enabled and manually switch outputs or specify on command-line as necessary
- Onboard audio disabled with volume control (via alsamixer) and VU meter
TLDR: It's a complicated can of worms and we're always looking for a better way, but the odds are stacked against us.
Edit: Volume Alsa issue for posterity: https://github.com/raspberrypi/lxpanel/issues/9
This installer ought to come with a warning! It breaks audio on the pi. I can no longer plug in my headphones. The onboard audio is now missing. In addition the volume control has been removed from the task bar and if I add it again it doesn't work!
Ok, it works but it is not integrated well.