Issues with Volume Control on Lenovo R61i

[[e-mail]]

There needs to be more granularity with the volume control.

When you compare the volume drop when using the alsa mixer to that of the volume buttons it differs:

Volume Button = 78 > 68

alsa mixer arrow keys = 78 >73

[Marvin (marvin-nospam)]

I made a screen capture (see attachment) to show what's wrong. In this video I change the volume by the volume buttons on the keyboard. In a terminal window I have alsamixer running to see how the volume controls are influenced by this. What you see there is also what I hear: The volume decreases when the volume notification bar (at the top right corner of the screen) decreases from 100% to approximately 60%. In that range the volume of the headphone control decreases from 100% to 0%. Then from 60% to somewhere around 5% in the notification bar, nothing happens. And when the notification bar decreases from 5% to 0% then the PCM control decreases from 100% to 0%.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[adecker (adecker89)]

When I look in sound settings I see two labels on the volume slider: unamplified and 100%. I'm not exactly sure what 'unamplified' means, but I know at that point my sound is effectively muted. That's a problem because unamplified is at about 75% of bar, leaving few useful volume settings.

[Phil Norisez (norisezp)]

11.10 install after applying Comment #4 Fix for bug 876020 on a Lenovo R61i (aka 89329xu). I cannot confirm the observation about the output volume in sound settings; I only have 100% marked about 2/3 of the way to the right. Here are some observations of my own:

1. Volume settings do not persist across boots.
2. In Gnome ALSA Mixer, I have two output controls, one for "Headphon" and one for "Speaker". At boot, they both default to maximum. There is a "PCM" control which seems to affect "Speaker". It also has three "Mic" controls, "Mic," "Mic1," and "Mic2." "Mic" correlates to "Input" in sound settings. "Mic1" and "Mic2" appear to do nothing. Neither "Input" not "Mic" have any effect on the volume of an external microphone; it 's always at maximum. They appear to only control the internal mic, and only to the extent of 2 or three notches on the "Input" indicator.
3. The command line alsamixer shows the same as Gnome ALSA mixer, but in Curses graphics. "Mic" also has the additional label "CAPTURE". These controls appear to function exactly like the Gnome ALSA Mixer. Indeed, corresponding controls track together betwee n the two programs.
4. Both Gnome ALSA Mixer and alsamixer identify my sound chip as "Conexant ID 5045." Previous to the bug 876020 fix, they correctly identified it as a 20549. I am going to back the fix out to see if it reverts, and report on that here.

All for now. Hope this information is helpful.

[Phil Norisez (norisezp)]

Hmm. After backing the change for bug 876020#4 out, the changes to the various controls persisted. In addition, control over the external mic volume seems to be enabled. Putting the change back in seems to make no difference.

[Phil Norisez (norisezp)]

The bug 876020#8 fix seems to only have had the effect of making all volume settings except "headphon" stick across boots. The "headphon" volume seems to be maxing out at boot.

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

Note that Conexant 5045=Venice=CX20549 .,three names for the same chip just to make things confusing (thanks, Conexant).

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for alsa-driver (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]