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Boosting volume with ALSA

Fri Nov 11, 2016 5:02 pm

I've done some searching but can't find a way to boost volume past 100% in ALSA. Most recommended solutions involve using pavucontrol which I would rather not install. I've tried using amixer to go above 100% but that doesn't work. The reason I'm trying to do this is because my netbook speakers are not very loud. In the past pavucontrol did allow me go above 100% and it made a huge difference without distortion. Surely there must be a way to boost the volume without any PulseAudio libraries?

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Fri Nov 11, 2016 5:11 pm

Have you looked at the archwiki alsa page? Seems I remember you can tweak volume with an .asoundrc config

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Fri Nov 11, 2016 5:39 pm

Yep, unfortunately I didn't find anything there. In fact on this particular netbook which has two sound cards (HDMI & Intel) I had to change the default card in / etc/modprobe.d because apparently Firefox doesn't acknowledge .asoundrc in the home directory.

Interesting note: I wasn't able to post this message because of forward slash etc. After putting a space between the slash and etc it let me post. Must be a phpBB bug or security function. If it's the latter it would be nice if they provided more insight as to why I couldn't post.

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Fri Nov 11, 2016 6:26 pm

The slash etc bug is a security feature. I haven't found a way to disable it. Meanwhile, /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin and pwn-you.sh are all safe paths, I guess.

vlc will let you raise volume over 100%, but only for vlc. I don't know what other software will let you do it.

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Mon Nov 14, 2016 2:39 am

any help?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=126789

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding- ... nd-levels/

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Mon Nov 14, 2016 7:24 am

arch wiki is a plague.

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Fri Nov 25, 2016 10:11 am

PhPBB isn't RESTful so it has the slash dot bug as a sort of reminder to do this in Scratch or something but without dorking up the costs badly somehow. Dunno. Maybe it's lynx friendly and it's the cost of that. I haven't been looking at the CVE vuln list for w3m lately...

I have a card that, once I ask to see the whole menu in alsamixer (..only iirc it was the default in this edition of Refracta...) offers me Mic boost and External Amplifier (which stops driving things like they're headphones so it doesn't overdrive and get clipped by the amp.) Do you not have such switches available?
Failing that, get into the alsamixer config file and permit yourself a new range; amixer set {mixername}={val} also seems to be a thing; askubuntu mentioned 152 percent as an example ceiling.

Are you sure your netbook doesn't have to take a certain amount of damage to unleash the limit break? :)

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Thu Dec 15, 2016 4:51 pm

Look what I just found:

https://lab.dyne.org/AlsaVolume

Please let us know if it works!

Re: Boosting volume with ALSA

Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:27 pm

Thanks! That looks like some cool "****" so I'll have to test it out.
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