[Grip-users] Low rip and CD playback volume with PulseAudio

[Dave Ulrick]

I'm running Grip 3.2.0 on Fedora 12 with KDE 4.4. My ripper is standalone
cdparanoia (/usr/bin/cdparanoia) and my encoder is oggenc.

I've noticed that since Fedora went to PulseAudio that the volume of the
rips I've made is dramatically lower compared with the rips I made without
PulseAudio. Even with Grip's volume slider set to maximum, the ogg files
I've created while PulseAudio is running are noticably less loud than my
earlier ogg files. CD playback from Grip's built-in CD player is likewise
lower in volume than without PulseAudio in the picture. The volume
differential is so great that there's just no way (short of increasing the
.WAV volume with 'sox'[1]) to generate oggs that match the volume of the
thousands of oggs I've previously created.

So far I'm inclined to suspect that the problem is the typical "PulseAudio
doesn't play nice with non-PulseAudio apps" problem. When I open the
PulseAudio volume control, the level meter stays at 0% when I'm playing a
CD track with Grip. I'd consider ditching PulseAudio entirely, but I'm
not 100% sure how I could still get "new mail" alerts, etc., from my KDE
apps if I use plain ALSA sound.

I'm curious if anyone here has noticed this behavior and, if so, what you
may have done to work around it?

Thanks,
Dave


[1] I'd rather not resort to this trick since, in my experience,
increasing the WAV volume with 'sox' makes it difficult to normalize the
volumes of tracks with tweaked vs. untweaked volumes.

[Joi Ellis]

On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 09:59 -0500, Dave Ulrick wrote:
[snip]

Post by Dave Ulrick
So far I'm inclined to suspect that the problem is the typical "PulseAudio
doesn't play nice with non-PulseAudio apps" problem. When I open the
PulseAudio volume control, the level meter stays at 0% when I'm playing a
CD track with Grip. I'd consider ditching PulseAudio entirely, but I'm
not 100% sure how I could still get "new mail" alerts, etc., from my KDE
apps if I use plain ALSA sound.
I'm curious if anyone here has noticed this behavior and, if so, what you
may have done to work around it?

...

PulseAudio offers a lot of controls for both input and output volumes,
and you can control these at both the hardware level *and* for the
application level. I've noticed that fresh Ubuntu/Debian installs using
PulseAudio have default settings that make some playback apps nearly
inaudible. There are also several different applets you have to load to
find all of these new controls. You can click on the speaker icon to
launch the volume control, but right-click/preferences gets you to
another set of controls. Then you've got the menu item
System/Preferences/Sound that gets yet a third view, which I find most
useful. (I'm looking at Ubuntu 9.04, YMMV.)

I doubt the problem is grip at all, but just PulseAudio's default
settings, which aren't all visible in one place. :p

[Dave Ulrick]

Post by Joi Ellis
I doubt the problem is grip at all, but just PulseAudio's default
settings, which aren't all visible in one place. :p

I've just tried ripping one of my "loud" tracks and one of my "soft"
tracks to WAV. The loud WAV is just as loud as the OGG I encoded over a
year ago, and the soft WAV is just as soft as the OGG from a couple of
days ago. This confirms that the issue is neither Grip nor PulseAudio
but the CDs that I happened to have chosen to rip over the last few weeks
happen to have been mastered at relatively low levels.

Problem resolution: increase the volume of the .wav with a rip filter
(sox -v) as I've done in the past with other quiet CDs.

Dave