need a little sound help

[luke9511]

hello its been a while sense i was last here but im bak lol anyway i got mandrake 10.1 installed on a computer with a built in via sound card now the sound works but kinda,wat i mean is that i can hear the sound but its really really low and the volume controlls r all the way up and im barely getting any sound,i thought about trying to change from alsa to the other one but i cant remember how,but if anyone knows anything about any of this please let me know and thanks in advance for any help

[Bizza]

Hi Mate,

Does your Mandrake install use Alsa drivers for the sound card? (it probably does). If so, from the command line type alsamixer this should bring up a little graphical representation of all the system wide levels of the various components of the sound card, use the cursor keys to navigate through the channels and turn them up or down, m will mute or unmute a channel and esc will exit and save.

Post back here if this doesn't help.


Cheers

[luke9511]

im using the gui and i started searching on how to do this and i found out about alsa mixer which alsa is wat my linux uses and i had to install it and its still the same the music from like music cds work and the music from the games work but now sound effects and i cant hear myself on my mic,also i have teamspeak for linux and when i join a server i cani barely hear the people talking (though lucky for me i also got a windows machine :P) but thanks for the advice oh and i use gnome.i dont know if this means anything but i thought i would put it in

[root@localhost trey]# /sbin/chkconfig --list alsa
alsa 0: off 1: off 2: on 3: on 4: on 5: on 6: off

[Bizza]

If your Linux install uses alsa you shouldn't have had to install anything.

Although you use a GUI you can still use command line options from a terminal window within the GUI.

I can't ascertain from your post whether or not you actually got alsa mixer to work, if you did, was there a mic channel that wasn't muted?

What's gnome got to do with the price of cheese :)

[luke9511]

well the mic wasnt muted and i guess i forgot to put this in cause im really tired lol but my mic sort of works i can hear myself but its staic and very low even know mic boost is on and the volume is up all the way,the mic works fin on my windows machine but not linux though audio cds play fine on linux and but if i play mp3s the sound is very low

[banzaikai]

"luke9511... I am... your father"

I've always wanted to type that.

Anyhoo...

On Linux mixers, I've had some really weird things happen on sound chipsets that allow anything more than 2.1 (stereo + sub). With something like the VIA (I've got one with my Syntax mobo), the jacks change function depending on what mode you're in. So, if you're in regular stereo, then blue is line-in, green is line-out, and red is mic-in. Change this to surround (5.1), and the blue becomes rear l-r, the green is front l-r, and the red is center/sub.

With Windows drivers, you select which mode you want, and adjust sliders accordingly. With ALSA (et. al.), it's a bit different...

Open up the mixer, and see if you have a "Surround" option (no slider). You want this muted for stereo, unmuted for 4.1/5.1 surround. There should also be "Line-In as Surround", which you want muted, too (unless you're using 4.1/5.1). If you don't see these, then open up the mixer preferences, and select the "extra" controls to display. Actually, just enable all of them, and try setting 'em one by one.

I just got done messing with my settings (to record from line-in), and found this out the hard way. Once set back to 2.1 mode, everything worked as advertised. It took me a couple of tries to figure out that's what "Surround" meant. Oddly enough, I wound up using my other computer to do the recording, as the on-board VIA (or crappy components on the Syntax) made everything "thound like lithping". My C-Media based card worked fine. Caveat Emptor...

banzai "Sound Off" kai