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Hi! I've got to love KDE about 4 years ago, when I started using KX Studio as my main system for music and sound production.
Now I'm running Linux Mint 18 with KDE5 and KX Studio repositories (for the audio stuff).

There's a problem when using JACK audio server, that makes it difficult to change the main system's sound output level. When you have a dedicated sound interface with knobs for everything its not a problem, you just set your alsamixer levels to 100% and attenuate from that using physical controls.

When there are no physical volume controls, one has to run a terminal and alsamixer and then use this to control the output levels. Its not convenient and now when I teach someone else how to do that, I see how convoluted this stuff really is.

My idea is:

Allow binding a user-defined alsamixer device/channel to the plasma panels sound applet.

Right now it only seems to work with PulseAudio - that's ok if PulseAudio sound server is the "master" for all sound playback on the system, but for pro-audio users JACK sound server is used instead (with PulseAudio often working with JACK), and theres no elegant and convenient way to change the system-wide loudness in such case.

Resorting to commandline alsa-mixer is a bit gruesome and simply looks bad - I also wish I could use the sound-related Fn buttons in laptop keyboards to control that (or special media keys on desktop keyboards).

Am I unaware of some neat way of getting that working this way? Enlighten me!

PS: Thank you for your great work - I really love Plasma 5 and all your effort on this wonderful desktop environment.

It is annoying and I've faced similar problems. You can assign keys to alsamixer controls though, I have this set:

Code: Select all

amixer -c 0 -q sset Master 2%-

and

Code: Select all

amixer -c 0 -q sset Master 2%+

You will have to set the card to be the number you use. It's not ideal but might make things a little easier.

You can also install and use kmix. It has been ported to KF5 and is part of the KDE Applications releases.
And it works without PulseAudio...