Low Volume in Mint 17.1 only after rebooting from Windows 7

[2slow4flo]

Hello,

I have a nerve wrecking problem with my sound in linux mint. I set up new hardware and a dual boot environment with windows 7 and linux mint and my volume is somehow suppressed. I researched my problem thoroughly and I couldn't fix it.

The problem:
After rebooting my sound volume is about 10-20% about as high as it should be. I can turn my speakers all the way to maximum volume and I can barely hear the sound.
The thing is however when I turn off my computer for a minute and start into linux mint my sound levels are completely normal, this means nothings wrong with my linux settings in ALSAMIXER etc.

Could be because I was booted in windows, I looked for power saving options for my sound card but couldn't find anything solving my problem. I tried many things related to sound drivers / mixers (stuff like 'hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D2 0x20 SET_PROC_COEF 0x7cb0').

I tried different kernel versions (3.13 and 3.16), sound adapter is REALTEK ALC1150.

/edit:
Ok it ONLY happens if I reboot direclty from windows into linux. If I shut down, wait a minute, boot into linux everything works. Rebooting from linux to linux also works. So somehow windows is corrupting the state of the sound card when shutting down and/or linux is not resetting the sound card state when booting.

Thanks in advance,
Flo

[Flemur]

The problem:
After rebooting [from Windows] my sound volume is about 10-20% about as high as it should be. I can turn my speakers all the way to maximum volume and I can barely hear the sound.
The thing is however when I turn off my computer for a minute and start into linux mint my sound levels are completely normal, this means nothings wrong with my linux settings in ALSAMIXER etc.

What do your alsamixer settings look like when the sound is low?
Do they show low volume or normal volume (even tho it's quiet)?
Most importantly, can you fix the low volume with alsamixer?

If it shows low settings and you can fix it after booting, and if you don't find a better answer, try running "amixer" at startup; if alsamixer shows a low setting somewhere, change it to the proper value with amixer.

Code: Select all

amixer set Master 100%

sets "Master" volume to 100%. Use the same names, e.g. "Master", that you see in alsamixer.

Note:
$ man amixer
has pretty bad examples and will make it sound overly complicated. Try google.

Edit: I decided to make a sound_init file to set everything properly.
Note the combo of %, dB and just a number (from 0->31).

Sometimes(!) 100% = 0dB = 31, and 0% = -46.50dB = 0 (for output volume settings).
and sometimes 35% = 0dB = 11 (for 'captures' 0dB is in the middle of the range, rather than at the top)

I couldn't figure out how to set a negative dB value, so used the plain number there: 30 = -1.5dB.

Code: Select all

#
# Turn on:
#
amixer set 'Master',0       100% unmute
amixer set 'Headphone',0    100% unmute
amixer set 'Capture',0       0dB unmute
amixer set 'Surround',0      50% unmute  # speaker
amixer set 'Side',0          30  unmute  # loop recording
#
# Turn on - mute not available
#
amixer set 'PCM',0          0dB
amixer set 'Digital',0      0dB
#
# Turn off:
#
amixer set 'Front',0       0 mute
amixer set 'Front Mic',0   0 mute
amixer set 'Center',0      0 mute
amixer set 'LFE',0         0 mute
amixer set 'Line',0        0 mute
amixer set 'Capture',1     0 mute
#
# Turn off - mute not available
#
amixer set 'Rear Mic',0         0
amixer set 'Front Mic Boost',0  0
amixer set 'Line Boost',0       0
amixer set 'Rear Mic Boost',0   0
#
# EOF

~

[2slow4flo]

I googled for hours and checking alsamixer related stuff was a given. Alsamixer settings are completely fine (turned up to the max. everywhere) and they do not change in any way, no matter if I have normal sound after a fresh boot, or if I have corrupted sound after a windows reboot.
It has to do with windows shutting down right before booting into linux, or linux not resetting the sound card state (or something similar).

Code: Select all

amixer set Master 100%

Doesn't change anything at all, also any other settings like 'PCM' 'FRONT' they're all at 100% already.

[jimallyn]

I don't know if this is related to your problem or not, but it might be. Because I sometimes use my mother's computer when I am at her house, I have installed Linux on it, dual booting with Windows XP. I found that if I just rebooted from XP straight into Linux, there would sometimes be strange glitches in the video. But if I shut the computer off completely, and left it off for 5 or 6 seconds before turning it back on and booting it into Linux, everything worked fine. My guess is that Windows leaves the hardware in some odd condition that isn't fully compatible with Linux. Maybe you have a similar problem?

[2slow4flo]

Yes it sounds very similar indeed. Problem is I didn't have these problems on my old hardware, so this bug annoys me a lot right now.