Audio settings keeps changing by random

Support Sound
#1

Hi,
So mint was not working for my desktop, so I jumped ships to Manjaro xfce and installed cinnamon on top!

I installed cinnamon like in this wiki: (new user here, can’t even link manjaro wiki… :sunny: )

And remove xfce with these set of commands:

sudo pacman -Rsn gtkhash-thunar
sudo pacman -Rsn xfce4 xfce4-goodies

And I did fix my audio setup like this: (new user can’t send pictures)
but here it’s like:
HDMI profile: off
usb audio profile: Mono Input
built-in Audio profile: Analog Stereo Output

And after that I did “sudo alsactl store -F” and set up the “alsactl restore” on start up with cinnamon but after some random min (like after 30min or 10 min) it ends up changing.

is there a way to know what changes my alsactl settings?

note:

  1. Doing “alsactl restore” fixes it but I have to do it everytime it changes.
  2. I had to do “alsactl store” as “sudo alsactl store -F” because it gave me errors without it.
  3. this is the message I get everytime I hit restore:
alsactl restore
alsactl: state_lock:125: file /var/lib/alsa/asound.state lock error: File exists
alsactl: load_state:1683: Cannot open /var/lib/alsa/asound.state for reading: File exists
alsa-lib main.c:983:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:0 use case configuration -2
Found hardware: "HDA-Intel" "Realtek ALC887-VD" "HDA:10ec0887,1458a184,00100302" "0x1458" "0xa184"
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
alsa-lib main.c:983:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:1 use case configuration -2
Found hardware: "HDA-Intel" "Nvidia GPU 99 HDMI/DP" "HDA:10de0099,1043872a,00100100" "0x1043" "0x872a"
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
alsa-lib main.c:983:(snd_use_case_mgr_open) error: failed to import hw:2 use case configuration -2
Found hardware: "USB-Audio" "USB Mixer" "USB1b3f:2008" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
#2

Bump,
Another question is there a log somewhere that I could go through so I might get a lead? Yeah, I’m a linux newbie!

#3

Bumping or empty posting is not tolerated on this forum - FAQ - Manjaro Linux Forum

New users usually get basic forum privileges within a day or so and should be able to post links
but a link can still be posted as preformatted text in the same way you already posted data

Posting images is not useful as they often do not show enough information and cannot be indexed by forum search or websearch to help other users. An image is not needed as you posted data to explain that PulseAudio profiles are configured to use mono USB device for audio capture and Onboard Audio (Realtek ALC887-VD) for audio playback

Is the change of volume is only for audio playback from onboard device ?

suggest you get a list of the ALSA audio playback devices to find the card number for the onboard device

aplay -l

(as it was first device found in alsactl it is probably card 0, but it might be card 1)
and then check ALSA settings

amixer --card=0

I suspect that only the first level control is affected by a level change, and that it is being changed by PulseAudio
If that is the case, check the audio settings for this device in PulseAudio

pacmd dump | grep analog

and this might show where the unwanted level setting may have originated

pacmd dump-volumes
1 Like
#4

turns out removing pavucontrol-qt fixed it. (I had pavucontrol and pavucontrol-qt)
Many hours on desktop and games with no changes in the audio.

edit: if you don’t mind I will have this topic open if the problem comes back in 1 or 2 days.

1 Like
#5

the issue is still here. though it kicks in when I’m afk…!!! Edit: no it happens on random.

#6

I do not recall anyone having installed both versions of pavucontrol before, so you may be the first to notice a conflict between the two packages that no one has thought to check

(can @Manjaro-Team look into this to consider marking these as conflicting?)

When both versions of pavucontrol were in use they would both have been writing user preferences for audio levels to the settings databases
(3 files in home folder ~/.config/pulse/ - card-database.tdb, device-volumes.tdb and stream-volumes.tdb)

I suggest you clear all 3 of these databases one at a time using these commands:

tdbtool ~/.config/pulse/*card-database.tdb erase

tdbtool ~/.config/pulse/*device-volumes.tdb erase

tdbtool ~/.config/pulse/*stream-volumes.tdb erase

and then reboot system to make sure the cleared databases are loaded

1 Like
#7

no such files existed so I end up deleting the whole folder ~/.config/pulse and had to reconfigure my outputs again.
if nothing happens in 1-2 days or the random audio change happens, I will post it here.

#8

I forgot that the database files also have the cookie ID number in the file name
I should have included an asterisk to allow for that number

Deleting the folder will also clear the old settings so I expect audio settings to be ok now

1 Like
#9

it’s still happening. will look into it more.
for now my solution is to make a bash script and do a key shortcut to quickly restore audio.