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Volume Keys Dont Work Alsa-only (Mint 8 x64)

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Stratus_ss

Overclockix Snake Charming Senior, Alt OS Content
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Location
South Dakota
So I set out to diagnose an issue I have with stuttering sound and I found it. Pulse audio seems to just not like some embedded videos in some games and it stutters to the point the games arent playable so I got rid of Pulse and updated Alsa. This improved game performance and fixed my problem.... but created another one in the process.

The volume buttons on my laptop no longer work. This is a major irritation when watching movies etc. I have checked the keyboard shortcuts and they havent changed. In fact I changed them and then changed them back with no luck. I have also bound the volume buttons to the + and - keys and they also dont do anything. I can change the sound via alsamixer but this is less then ideal. I googled a bit but all the suggestions I came across dont apply as they are for when the OS doesn't recognize the keys.

Mine recognize the keys, it just doesnt do anything, and furthermore, it doesnt do anything if I rebind the keys either. Anyone have any suggestions?
 
That used to be an easy question to answer but with 9.1 I dont know how to do that anymore
but if I use alsa mixer the volume changes on the computer.

It just doesnt do it with the hotkeys
 
have you opened up alsamixer and watched to see if the volume keys are just changing the incorrect channel? i've ran into that problem before with my laptop. it would change the volume for the headphone jack only and not for the output to my laptop's speakers.
 
I did have alsamixer open, yes. I did not see any of the volume bars being affected
 
Can you bind the keys to run a specified command?

Volume up:
Code:
amixer -c0 sset 1 1%+
Volume down:
Code:
amixer -c0 sset 1 1%-

Use "amixer -c0 controls" to find the right "numid" to put after sset, but it'll probably be 1. Change the percentage to whatever you want.

I just installed PulseAudio on my laptop (with Gentoo) yesterday because of stupid friggin' retarted applications that grab hw:0,0 instead of dmix:0 and provide no option to do otherwise and now have ALSA redirecting everything to Pulse for mixing which then redirects to ALSA for output.
 
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