New Sound card but i've lost PCM volume control

Submitted by seanjackson on Sun, 2019-09-29 16:42

Forums:

MOC version: 
2.6 Alpa3

I finally got my DenonUSB300 soundcard working with MOC, I changed the 'allow24bitoutput' to yes in config to get it going and it's sounding great - however unlike my older (non 24bit) soundcard seems i can't control the volume level from my keyboard anymore, I've checked/un-checked the PCM option in audio preferences on my raspberrypi3. The only other option 'clock source 41 Validity' didn't help either :-(
Can anyone shed any light on what i might be missing or am i back to manual volume control via the sound system again (please no!).

Sean

tomaszg

Sun, 2019-09-29 16:50

Maybe you need to change ALSAMixer1 or ALSAMixer2 in MOC config file. You can check also MOC debug output (-D or -SF for a limited subset) - it will probably contain something along the lines:

alsa_init_mixer_channel(): ERROR: Can't find mixer PCM

It's also possible (but unlikely) that your sound card doesn't have a hardware volume control and you would have to use "softmixer" in MOC.

seanjackson

Tue, 2019-10-01 22:05

thank you tomaszg. I do indeed have soundcard with no hardware volume so i have got 'softmixer' to handle my volume now, not as smooth as 'pcm' was with the old card but it works well. I have to toggle the software mixer manually with the x key as i cannot get MOC to save it, i am using the config file option of 'Softmixer_SaveState = yes' but no success as it just defaults to 'pcm' on each restart.

tomaszg

Tue, 2019-10-01 22:22

It's a known problem - there are some workarounds mentioned in some places, e.g. https://moc.daper.net/node/474 but they require compiling your own version of MOC. It's also rather easy to hardcode softmixer to be a default mixer. If I remember correctly, it's enough to change value of current_mixer from 0 to 2 in audio.c.

jcf

Tue, 2019-10-01 23:06

It is a known issue, as tomaszg says, and I even have a patch in the pipeline to address it, but it's not yet committed.