Sound problems (volume control/(un)mute/...)

[MusicidalOtaku]

Hi there,
I recently started using Sabayon and from the beginning somehow my sound didn't work correctly.
I read an article in the Wiki about fixing problems with Intel sound cards (http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title ... ound_Cards) and after that I could playback sound.
The problem I still have is that when I use the audio mixer applet in my XFCE menu panel all kinds of strange things happen: If I set the volume control to any channel that affects curent audio playback (PulseAudio master, HDA Intel PCH Alsa mixer master, Alsa mixer Headphones) and I scroll under a certain level it mutes one of the other master channels (if I do it in Alsa it mutes pulseaudio and vice versa). And doing some things (I have no idea what exactly triggers it) seems to reset the alsa mixer master and headphones channels to 0 and the speakers channel to max.
Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this? I've tried editing settings files for both alsa and pulseaudio, ... I just have no idea what's going on.
Are there outputs to commands that I can post that can help you identify the problem?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

[dave_64]

These sound card problems can be a real pita.
Do you have satisfactory sound when you run the livedvd?

[MusicidalOtaku]

I don't have the LiveDVD with me and I can't burn a new one at the moment, unfortunately, so I can't test that.
Somehow the problem resolved itself... I really don't get what I did... Now I have only the ALSA mixer, which gives satisfactory results. I did have problems with Banshee crashing but it doesn't do that any more... I seem to have this all the time, things that I try to fix, the fix doesn't work and then when I boot the next day it's miraculously fixed. I had exactly the same experience trying to get IBUS to work as a proper input method... I fiddled with the settings, tried something else, gave up, and when I rebooted the next day it suddenly worked... I thought you didn't have to reboot to apply settings changes in Linux?

[dave_64]

Sometimes you have to reboot to get changes to take effect. Installing a new kernel is one of them. In other cases, you can issue a command to tell linux to re-read the file you have just altered. For me, it's just easier to reboot. The command to re-read a file is:
source /path/to/file
Suppose you change your .bashrc file. To have the changes take effect immediately, you would issue this command:
source .bashrc