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Shane Rouse

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Aug 3, 2024, 3:22:34 PM8/3/24

to glucjacklepad

- I have searched all over forum posts and the only band-aid solution is using an equalizer like jamesDSP for linux but even though that fixes it a bit , the sound doesnt come close to the windows one.

Fine if i need to mess more with EQ settings i will , i already thought of trying to emitate windows audio settings but i cant find them nor can i find any useful guide or article about it, if you know anything about that please forward me to a useful resource. Now a question, do only arch based distros not manipulate the audio to sound better like windows does ? Ive gone through so many forums and posts with people with Lenovo legions my exact model or lenovo laptops in general not complaining about sound at all. Did they have other distros like fedora which automatically does stuff like that so they never noticed?

You're volume is reduced across the board here, you're probably not cranking it enough in general. Put the firefox and your card volume to 100% with your favorite pulse mixer (note the dumb specialty of firefox that will override your volume choice with the actual player volume, so you'll want to crank the youtube volume slider explicitly as well)

I put it 100% and maxed the bar in firefox, it actually doesnt sound that bad or im going insane . Im used at putting at low 40's in windows and put the slider in the middle and when trying to replicate that here , maybe thats why it sounded so bad
Maybe with a few tweaks here and there with the equalizer i can fix it

There is one thing i noticed in firefox , if i max the volume slider in youtube and then head over to the pulse volume control gui i can see that that the firefox tab that has the youtube video is only at 75-85% i can increase it to 100% in there and get more volume.This is the reason i believe listening from mpv was better because it did not have that 15-25% nerf that firefox had.

I have a decent 9th Gen Intel/Intel desktop rig with a decent but inexpensive LogiZ407 external sound system, but since it's also my small living room's entertainment device, it needs an adjunct EQ to refine audio output. In Windows I use FXSound (free). In Arch I use JamesDSP (AUR). Both are easily user-configurable and neither requires a post-grad degree in audio engineering to do so.

I apologize. I should have more closely qualified my statement, since streaming movies, etc. from Netflix, Prime & Max in Chromium/Chrome are where a simple EQ is what I need and JamesDSP is what fills that simple need. "Even" on pipewire/pulse, LOLOLOL. (There is also a PulseAudio version in the AUR for those so inclined.)

I have raised audio volume above 100% using gnome-volume-control. However, this only works from the Audio Settings dialog and if you ever change the volume from the applet it drops back to 100% and won't go above it again.

Lol what great answers..."buy louder speakers...its a motherboard problem". Sorry to say but this is 100% an ALSA problem. A little googling will show you that this problem has existed since at least 2004 and the ALSA community doesn't seem to care very much about fixing it. I (as well as countless others) have even dual-booted and tried the same sound files back to back in linux and windows with linux always coming out much quieter. I suspect that Apple and Microsoft use a brickwall limiter in their audio signal chain, thus allowing them to push pre-amp volume a bit over "100%" without causing clipping. You are supposed to be able to add a Pre-Amp control to the alsamixer ( -an-alsa-software-pre-amp-to-fix-low-sound-levels/) but I have yet to get it working with Debian so far. I am annoyed that the ALSA wiki doesn't even mention this extremely common problem...

The exception to this rule, is that the sound stream itself can be modified--generally by compressing the dynamic range of the audio, so that quiet sounds seem louder. Technically, this degrades the sound quality, but may be what PulseAudio (whatever that is--I've never heard of it) does.

EDIT: I don't know of anything that does dynamic range compression, as mentioned above, on they fly in Linux, but ALSA is very configurable, so I'm sure it could be done with enough research and effort. But at my hourly pay rate, I could buy a lot of really nice speakers for the time it would take me to figure out how to do it in ALSA... and the results would be better with new speakers.

In Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, you can simply open Settings and after that search for "sound" or just click on the Sound tab on the left side of the Settings panel. After that press "Over-Amplification" and change your max sound volume to more than 100% (more details on the screenshot below)

Someone mentioned in another forum the install of Paman. (Pulse audio manager). Unbelievable, this allowed me to increase to up to 200% !!! the volume (go to Devices tab, select the alsa output pci and click properties. Then increase the volume). This helped me, i hope it helps you too.

I'd like to permanently disable all desktop notification sounds. I still want the notification popups, and I still want all other audio to be played. The only sounds that I want to always be blocked are desktop notification sounds.

That's interesting. Xfce doesn't have any notification sounds by default, except for maybe the beep when logging out if the pcspkr driver is loaded. Specifically which notification sounds are you referring to?

This is not application-specific. I get notifications from several different browsers and several other applications, and these notifications all behave identically: same notification popup. same look and feel, same behavior, and same sound.

Thank you very much. I can lower the volume level of the system sounds via "pavucontrol", and it indeed also lowers the volume of those notification sounds. However, I don't want to lower the volume of *all* audio nor disable it. I just want to get rid of those notification sounds that I described. If I'm listening to something on line (for example), I want the system volume to be at a normal level. But then, any notifications which migh pop up make a very annoying sound. I want to get rid of those notification sounds completely, so I can keep audio enabled for other reasons, without being annoyed by those notifications.

As you can see in the command outputs below, "/Net/EnableEventSounds" and "/Net/EnableInputFeedbackSounds" are set to "false", and /Net/SoundThemeName" is "default". And you can also see that "xfce4-notifyd" is running.

The "System sounds" refers to the notification sounds you here. If you start up a media player or browser, you'll see a entry of its own that will be different from the System Sounds. In fact, you can turn system sounds right down and it won't affect the sounds of any media players.

I finally figured this out. It's indeed Chrome which is playing those annoying notification sounds, and this has nothing to do with Xfce4. And in Google's infinite "wisdom", they do not permit notification sounds to be turned off within Chrome. The Chrome notifications themselves can be turned on and off, but if those notifications are turned on, then the sounds will also be turned on. And these annoying sounds go through the normal audio stream, which means that I cannot disable those Chrome notification sounds unless I also disable all other audio.

The sole reason I use Chrome under linux is to enable me to run LINE Messenger on my linux box, since a Chrome plug-in seems to be the only way to get LINE working under linux (I've never been able to get it working under Wine). So, I now have to figure out a better way to solve the LINE-Messenger-under-linux problem.

i have to regularly re-login my wifi. they dump all routes for each user about 30 minutes after they login. so i wrote a couple Python3 scripts to watch for loss of reachability. then it disconnects my from the wifi and connects me back on, again (for another 30 minutes). i get a notification for the disconnect and another for the connect. they are fast enough for YouTube videos to play right through (99% do). i get no sounds from either of these. i think Xfce has nothing to do with these notifications otherwise i'd ask how to turn on sound and describe that i did nothing to make them silent on my Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS system.