I encounter some issues configuring audio with ALSA on my Seagate Dockstar on which I plugged a little USB audio card.
I'm able to play music with MOC but I'm stuck with a volume way to high.
Whatever I tried, the gain of the PCM control is stuck above +10dB even when the sliders of alsamixer are at 0%, and the sound is really too loud unless muted (speakers or headphones).
When I increase the volume, the gain grows further and the resulting volume increases further too, so the control of the volume works, but the problem is that it begins at +10dB instead of -48dB.
This is the output of amixer command when I lower the volume at the minimum without muting:
root@host:~# amixer
Simple mixer control 'PCM',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 13568
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 1 [0%] [10.00dB] [on]
Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [10.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
Capabilities: cvolume cvolume-joined cswitch cswitch-joined penum
Capture channels: Mono
Limits: Capture 0 - 6096
Mono: Capture 0 [0%] [0.00dB] [on]
Notice the [10.00dB] even if I'm at 0% volume.
I followed this guide to configure it all.
I remember that I followed this before (more than one year ago), and that it worked back then, but I can't remember if I had to tweak something specific or not at that time.
I don't want to install Pulseaudio if possible, as I really think it is overkill for just the sake of playing a sound file (for those who don't know what the Dockstar is, it is a dock for hard drives which features 4 USB connectors + 1 Ethernet Gigabit, with a "motherboard" based on an Kirkwood ARM architecture).
I just did a base-install of Debian Squeeze and this is console only. I really want to avoid to install all the x11 dependencies of Pulseaudio.
Moreover I know that it worked in the past without the need to install more than ALSA.
TLDR: How can I alter the base gain of the PCM channel in ALSA?
Here is the Output of an information script which shows all my current config.
NB: I already tried to use max_dB and min_dB in /etc/asound.conf as proposed here, without success.
