Arch Linux

Burning_aces

Member

Registered: 2009-09-29

Posts: 120

Audio issues with ASUS G750JX

Hey Arch,
I'm having a bit of trouble with my audio and was hoping you guys could assist me with it/simplify it.

Incase no one reads all the way to the bottom, basically I'm wondering if theres a way of just using one audio system and not having to worry about the other.

Volume levels won't save no matter what I've tried so far, plus everytime the laptop gets turned on, the headphones level which controls speakers is set to 0

"HDA Intel PCH (Alsa mixer)" "Headphone" controls Bass, "Speaker" controls speakers, "PCM" controls something else as sound gets quieter when it's lowered.

If I plug headphones in, everything gets muted, although after unmuting audio is played through the headphones, however when the headphones are unpluged, the audio mutes again until I manually unmute each stream.

I'm unsure which programs use which audio system, be it Alsa mixer or PulseAudio
Gmusicbrowser - audio is controlled both by itself and by Alsa/Pulse it seems
Vlc - similar but seems to match what both Alsa and Pulse show

I've tried setting them to just use one audio system but it doesnt seem to work.

Below are what come up in the xfce4-mixer

HDA Intel PCH (Alsa mixer)*
HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer)
Playback: GK106 HDMI Audio Controller Digitial Stereo (HDMI) (PulseAudio Mixer)
Playback: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)*

*Both seem to control audio, "HDA Intel PCH (Alsa mixer)" master "somewhat mirrors" what "Playback: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)" does. Eg "Master" is lowered in "HDA Intel PCH (Alsa mixer)" it gets lowered in "Playback: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo (PulseAudio Mixer)" but doesnt exactly match it

$lspci |grep Audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GK106 HDMI Audio Controller (rev a1)

The following are packages installed relating to Alsa or Pulseaudio

multilib/lib32-libpulse
multilib/lib32-alsa-lib
extra/libao
extra/libcanberra-pulse
extra/libpulse
extra/pulseaudio
extra/pulseaudio-alsa
extra/alsa-lib
extra/alsa-plugins
extra/alsa-utils
extra/zita-alsa-pcmi

*multilib packages are primarily due to having skype (don't think I've installed anything else from multilib)
I'm set to get updates from testing and community-testing

Side note - if anyone knows how to get the XF86Backlight keys working (for the actual backlight) that would be cool, currently i control the backlight with the xfce4 power manager plugin.

Thanks to who ever is able to help.