Sound problems

Yesterday I finally decided to fix a problem  with my laptop that I had been ignoring for at least a year. Essentially, when I used the volume buttons on my keyboard the volume would change by approximately 25% of its max loudness, so it got loud or quiet very fast.  I could change the volume in smaller increments using the volume slider but I like using the keyboard buttons, so my laptop had essentially 3 volume levels: loud, audible, and mute.  The source of the problem seems to be this bug  and unfortunately upstream (Gnome I think) did not want to spend much, or any, time on fixing this.

Fortunately, after much sleuthing, I found this post on ask Ubuntu, which in turn uses information found on Ubuntu's wiki which unfortunately has removed that page.    The fix boils down to adjusting two lines in a config file:

Fix / Workaround

There are a few variables which control how PulseAudio controls the volume. You can either edit /etc/pulse/default.pa (you'll have to be root to do that) to change the behavior for all users, or copy that file to ~/.pulse/default.pa and then edit that file, to change behavior for the current user only.

Open the file mentioned above. Find the row saying "load-module module-udev-detect" and change it to:

load-module module-udev-detect ignore_dB=1

and I also needed

Find the row saying "#load-module module-alsa-sink" and change it to:

load-module module-alsa-sink control=PCM

Of course you may be wondering why I am blogging about something like this.  Well, simply put this is mostly intended to be a personal trail of breadcrumbs.  More math will be coming later this afternoon.