Can I increase the sound volume above 100% in Linux?

Question

I am running KDE 4.6 in Debian Testing. Is there a way to increase the sound (i.e. more than the standard 100%)? The current settings with my speakers seem a bit too quiet in some cases.

I found a way to do it in PulseAudio, but I don't think Debian's KDE build is compatible.

Solution 1

Have you tried changing the various channels through alsamixer? (run it from the terminal)

You may also want to check your PulseAudio settings. There's a GUI front-end package called pavucontrol that allows you to easily change these settings.

Solution 2

The answer is yes you can, install pulseaudio, on debian like for example

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pavucontrol

Increasing volume using gui

just open pavucontrol and scroll the volume bar

Increasing volume programmatically

Use the command below to increase the audio

pactl -- set-sink-volume $SINK +110%

where $SINK is the number of the audio channel, it can be 0, 1, 2, N. To check the available channels you can use

pactl list | grep 'Sink'

I,ve made the following command to automatically detect the audio channels and increase the volume by 3%

pactl list | grep -oP 'Sink #\K([0-9]+)' | while read -r i ; do pactl -- set-sink-volume $i +3% ; done

Make sure to restart you computer after install pulseaudio

Solution 3

I have raised audio volume above 100% using gnome-volume-control. However, this only works from the Audio Settings dialog and if you ever change the volume from the applet it drops back to 100% and won't go above it again.

Never tried it in KDE.

Solution 4

Lol what great answers..."buy louder speakers...its a motherboard problem". Sorry to say but this is 100% an ALSA problem. A little googling will show you that this problem has existed since at least 2004 and the ALSA community doesn't seem to care very much about fixing it. I (as well as countless others) have even dual-booted and tried the same sound files back to back in linux and windows with linux always coming out much quieter. I suspect that Apple and Microsoft use a brickwall limiter in their audio signal chain, thus allowing them to push pre-amp volume a bit over "100%" without causing clipping. You are supposed to be able to add a Pre-Amp control to the alsamixer (http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adding-an-alsa-software-pre-amp-to-fix-low-sound-levels/) but I have yet to get it working with Debian so far. I am annoyed that the ALSA wiki doesn't even mention this extremely common problem...

Solution 5

That's not a KDE issue. But the short answer is "No." If all of your volumes are set at 100%, then they're already at their max.

The exception to this rule, is that the sound stream itself can be modified--generally by compressing the dynamic range of the audio, so that quiet sounds seem louder. Technically, this degrades the sound quality, but may be what PulseAudio (whatever that is--I've never heard of it) does.

Your best bet is probably to buy better/more amplified speakers.

---

EDIT: I don't know of anything that does dynamic range compression, as mentioned above, on they fly in Linux, but ALSA is very configurable, so I'm sure it could be done with enough research and effort. But at my hourly pay rate, I could buy a lot of really nice speakers for the time it would take me to figure out how to do it in ALSA... and the results would be better with new speakers.

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Comments

[Admin]

I was able to do it in debian after installing pulseaudio, but that was under gnome. I've just installed pulseaudio under kde but doesn't work in the same way. Would be nice if someone know something about it. Thank you.

[rogerdpack]

paman may work (worked for me in Ubuntu): superuser.com/questions/146784/…

[Keith]

It seems that many modern motherboards expect to have external amplification. They don't have built-in audio amplifiers any more.

[Ravindra Bawane]

Even discrete sound cards do not generally have amplifiers. Output is high enough to drive a pair of headphones (300 -800 milliwatts) and then if a pair of speakers are used, they almost always have amplification built in themselves.

[frustrated]

this one works for Debian (igmrlm.blogspot.com/2012/06/…)

[Felipe]

pactl -- set-sink-volume 0 50.0 solved my issue with soundcard in Q4OS.

[IQAndreas]

This can be done on fish shell with pactl -- set-sink-volume (pactl list | grep -B 1 'RUNNING' | grep -o '[0-9]' | read -z) +3% –Gabriel Alves Cunha

[Alexei Martianov]

Your answer suggests there is a dynamic range data somewhere in audio metadata for player to adjust max volume each time file is opened. AFAIK this is nonsense, some audio data are just coded as low volume and just raising amplification would help, I'm perplexed large amp range has not been programmed still after many years, it is just small bit of coding IMHO...

[Alexei Martianov]

Good, but sometimes I want to raise 500%, maybe I'm getting old...

[jelleklaver]

@AlexeiMartianov: It's not sored as metadata. It's an inherent trait of the audio. It can be detected via analysis.

[Alexei Martianov]

@Flimzy, Surely it can be. But my point was that players rarely (if ever) do that analysis before starting to play new file. How per your knowledge they know max volume to adjust output "power"?

[jelleklaver]

Anything doing it on the fly would have to make assumptions (perhaps based on user-provided specifications). More likey, if such an implementation exists, it probably does so based on some sort of windowing algorithm to determine the recent max volume, and thus make assumptions about the next N audio frames. MY point is that ALSA is very flexible, and you can write your own extensions to do practically anything you want. Thus the OP's goal is not entirely beyond the realm of theoretical possibility.

[RatajS]

There is now also a Qt port from the LXQt team available as pavucontrol-qt: github.com/lxqt/pavucontrol-qt

[Admin]

Your "command to automatically detect ... and increase" is awesome! I've been using grep since 1995 and this is the first I've seen \K used. Thank you for teaching it to me! I added an explanation and documentation to your answer. ☮️❤️🌈