About a month ago I was out of town and went to make a phone call using Twinkle and my Logitech USB headset. The volume was so faint I could barely hear the person on the other end.
A few weeks before it had worked just fine. Somewhere in the usual torrent of Fedora updates something changed (regressed). The fantastic Paul Frields solved the problem for me over the phone yesterday.
Somehow the Alsa volume setting for my USB headset changed to zero. The steps to fix it are very similiar to the problem I had on Fedora 11. Here are the steps to fix the current scenario:
1) Plug in USB headset
2) Run alsamixer from a command line
3) Hit <F6> to find and select the USB headset device
4) Use the up and down arrow keys to adjust the volume
I haven’t played around with this enough yet to notice, but according to Paul he has to manually reset the volume using alsamixer every time the USB headset is plugged in again.
April 26, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Thanks for this little article, I noticed that my Logitech has the same problem in RHEL6 but not in Ubuntu 11 (on the same machine). I used alsamixer just now and it fixed the issue. woot!
August 19, 2011 at 6:20 pm
thanks, it work for me….thanks for the help!!!!!!
July 30, 2011 at 11:50 am
awesome worked perfectly
October 30, 2010 at 7:59 am
In F14, bug 637291 is fixed, so “alsactl store” just works. My headset volume setting in /etc/asound.state is also restored on boot, so I can just set it to 100% once, run “alsactl store” as root, then never have to do it again. The setting also survives unplugging and replugging the headset.
Greg: just noticed you were using F12. Maybe it was working in F12, broke in F13, and was fixed in F14.
September 25, 2010 at 8:33 am
Some progress – due to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=637291 /etc/asound.state is created with the wrong SELinux context, which makes saving mixer settings on shutdown fail. Running “restorecon -v /etc/asound.state” as root fixes this. And running “alsactl restore” as root after boot restores the settings. But the settings don’t seem to be restored automatically. I could put this command in /etc/rc.local, but it shouldn’t be necessary.
June 10, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Nope, nothing non-standard. Pulseaudio is installed (though I’m annoyed that Pulseaudio + latest Skype == a feature regression, since I can no longer have ringing on one device and talking on another, so tempted to remove it!)
But basically it’s a stock Fedora 12 installation, especially from a sound perspective. Everything is standard.
June 3, 2010 at 2:18 pm
I did this. In fact, the settings do appear to be saved in /etc/asound.state, but they don’t take effect when I log in. I also get a warning about not being able to save mixer settings when shutting down. Have you done something nonstandard, such as disable pulseaudio, or change the permissions or ownership of /etc/asound.state?
state.Headset {
control.1 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type BOOLEAN
comment.count 1
iface MIXER
name ‘Mic Playback Switch’
value false
}
control.2 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type INTEGER
comment.count 1
comment.range ‘0 – 464’
comment.dbmin -4100
comment.dbmax -1200
iface MIXER
name ‘Mic Playback Volume’
value 0
}
control.3 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type BOOLEAN
comment.count 1
iface MIXER
name ‘Speaker Playback Switch’
value true
}
control.4 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type INTEGER
comment.count 2
comment.range ‘0 – 44’
comment.dbmin 0
comment.dbmax 300
iface MIXER
name ‘Speaker Playback Volume’
value.0 44
value.1 44
}
control.5 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type BOOLEAN
comment.count 1
iface MIXER
name ‘Mic Capture Switch’
value true
}
control.6 {
comment.access ‘read write’
comment.type INTEGER
comment.count 1
comment.range ‘0 – 13’
comment.dbmin 1600
comment.dbmax 2900
iface MIXER
name ‘Mic Capture Volume’
value 5
}
}
June 3, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Quick follow-up, now I understand this. Actually you need to set your volume how you want it in alsamixer *then* execute:
su -c “alsactl store”
This will save the current settings. If you change them and you want them to be remembered in the changed state, you must execute the command again.
May 20, 2010 at 11:12 am
Does not work for me, even though the command newly created the file /etc/asound.state.
May 20, 2010 at 2:14 am
Try this, it seems to work:
su -c “alsactl store”
Seems the alsamixer config is not being saved because the file it expects to contain the current settings, /etc/asound.state, does not exist. alsactl store forces the creation of that file.
I have not rebooted yet, but I’ve unplugged and re-plugged my Logitech headset a couple of times and the settings seem to stick! Yay! =)
Reference:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/trouble-saving-alsamixer-settings-yada-yada-146563/
May 19, 2010 at 6:36 am
Thanks, I had the same problem. Your solution helps (at least until there is a real fix).
May 2, 2010 at 8:58 am
I and my father are having the exact same problem – it only happens with specific models of USB headset. I filed
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=588098
April 29, 2010 at 4:24 am
As Daniel says, the volume being reset each time you plug the device to a different level than what you had set when you unplugged it is a classic sign of PA and the kernel having disagreements over volume info. If you could file a bug against PA, using the instructions – https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_PulseAudio_problems – that would help.
April 28, 2010 at 7:36 am
The above bug commented by bochecha, while well-intentioned, is unfortunately not precise to your symptom of needing to reset the volume for usb audio devices per insertion. That’s a pulseaudio bug.
April 28, 2010 at 4:13 am
This looks a lot like this bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=497966
Might be nice to have it fixed once and for all instead of doing it again each time you plug your headset 😉