Cannot find mixer control Master

[illuusio]

I'm setting up ALSA/LTSP5 enviroment on openSUSE 11.0 and got these errors when lauching pulseaudio (That is used in LTSP5)

Cannot find mixer control "Master" Cannot find fallback mixer control "PCM"

(Can't paste them because they are on LTSP machines.. but I figured out this there isn't Master or PCM in mixer (it's snd_intel_hda module) so I little bit hacked this and made this tiny patch to show how I get it working

[illuusio]

Little patch workaround to fix cases when there isn't Master or PCM in ALSA mixer

[coling]

This is an ALSA bug. ALSA devs have stated that they want all hardware to provide a "Master" mixer.

You should try the latest version of the alsa drivers (1.0.18rc3) to see if this is fixed and if not, report it to the ALSA folks via their mailing list (their bug tracker is a black hole so don't touch it!)

You should include the output from amixer -c 0 when you report it to them, as well as the relevant line from lspci -nn for your audio hardware.

FWIW, you may have more success without your patch if you set default-sample-channels=6 in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

[illuusio]

Ok.. this also BIG bug for me:) not just for ALSA. In my point of view _this_doesn't_work_. I just don't care is it fixed on ALSA 1.0.18rc3 because it's not on may openSUSE 11.0 out of the box :P. So if I was normal user I wouldn't patch my ALSA nor I wouldn't have any clue whatta heck means default-sample-channels=6 because there isn't any documention or GUI to set it up. I just would say Pulseaudio SUXX and stop using it (ALSA works if use it or ESD that also work out of the box or even NASD works). So does it make Pulseaudio bloat to have some option if everyone in earth doesn't have ALSA develoment packages installed??

[coling]

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your situation. A similar same thing happened to me with some hardware a while back (the Master channel didn't actually work, and using the PCM was the the only way I could get the volume controls to work). So for me the order in which pulse used the mixers was "wrong".

But that doesn't change where the fundamental problem is. You report a bug in pulseaudio, and I explain, quite clearly, that this is actually an ALSA problem. You then flame pulse for not working around a bug that lies elsewhere and could have completely different workarounds on different hardware (thus making the inclusion of a workaround in pulse harder).

Despite me giving you a potential workaround to try (because it looked like your card was wanting to use a surround mixer on a stereo setup and using pulse in a 5 channel way may have fixed the mixer problems), explaining what option in what config file you needed to tweak, and they you again flame me for saying you didn't have a clue that I meant (I thought my instructions where clear but I guess not.).

This all comes down to a question of software quality. You seem to suggest that by not adding a sticking plaster in pulse, that makes pulse worse. I disagree. Putting the fix in the right place makes the whole system of Free software better. So don't spit the dummy out just because your personal immediate need is not met, report the issues to the right channels, fix them appropriately or help/encourage others to do so, and help make Free software as a whole better.