I have a weird issue with my mic volume. I’m using cheap logitech USB sound card similar to this: New Logitech USB to 3.5mm Jack Stereo Headset Audio Adapter External Sound Card - Newegg.com
At every startup, gain of the mic will be way to high (just plain speaking will cause clipping). However, looking at the pulse volume control, volume is exactly where I left it before turning off PC (around 50%). Changing the volume in pulse volume control has no desirable effect (it just lowers the “output volume” (compresses the audio), but the input volume is still clipping).
Adjusting the alsa volume directly however, is a different story. If I open alsamixer, I again see the volume at where I left it (let’s say at 50%). BUT just moving this slider fixes the issue. For example, moving the volume to 51% fixes the mic gain and volume is once again on the manageable level.
So I guess this is some glitch with the USB sound card. I set up a script that calls amixer at startup and increments and decrements the volume by 1 to workaround the issue. But this does not appear to work.
After some trial and error, I figured out that adjusting the volume only works AFTER input stream has been opened at least once. So my current workaround is to first run arecord at startup that opens up the audio stream, followed by the amixer that fixes the volume:
arecord -f S16_LE --rate 44100 -c 1 -d 1 /dev/null;amixer set Capture 51%;amixer set Capture 50%
This works, but it is not closer to finding the root cause of the issue.
Any idea what could cause this?
Running 5.12.8-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri May 28 19:32:35 UTC 2021 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Pulseaudio 14.2-3