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authorLennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>2009-04-27 01:18:37 +0200
committerLennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>2009-04-27 01:18:37 +0200
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+This tool will help you to determine the volume scaling factors of your sound
+card. If your sound card/chip manufacturer did not provide you with
+documentation to which attenuation specific volume settings belong this tool
+can help you to measure them.
+
+What you need:
+
+a) A sound card where input and output are synchronous
+
+b) A feedback cable that allows you to feed sound card output back into the input
+
+c) Some time
+
+In this is how you do it:
+
+1) You plug in your feedback cable in the line out and line in of your soundcard
+
+2) You open the low-level ALSA mixer and mute/set to 0 everything you can
+mute/set to 0, except what is necessary to get a PCM signal out of your machine
+and back into the machine. The slider you want to measure you set the highest
+possible value. The other sliders that are in our pipeline you set to some
+'sensible' value, in the middle of its range somewhere. What does 'sensible'
+mean? Something where neither clipping happens nor where the signal is too
+faint. In 'alsamixer -c0' those points are usually near 0dB or a bit lower. If
+you are not sure what to pick don't despair, our little tool will tell you if
+you picked a good value. 'Inner' sliders should always be kept near to 0dB.
+
+3) You run our little tool like this:
+
+ make && ./dbmeasure plughw:0 log.csv
+
+This will now measure a few things and then ask you to lower the volume one
+step. Please comply and press return. It will now measure a little bit more,
+and ask again and so on. When you went through all volume levels successfully
+press C-D instead of return.
+
+If the volume levels mentioned in step 2 were not set up correctly the tool will
+fail and ask you to adjust them a little. Then repeat step 3.
+
+The first argument to the tool is the device to use. It will be opened for both
+capturing and playback. The second argument is the filename of a CSV file where
+the tool will place its results. The first column of that file is the numer of
+the volume step we are looking at. Starting with the highest one. The last
+column is the attenuation in dB relative to the highest volume level (and hence
+is always at 0dB on the first line). You can then load the CSV output into
+Gnumeric to draw pretty graphs.
+
+If you want to use the output of this tool in low-level drivers, keep in mind
+that there volume level 0 is usally the lowest one, while in our CSV it is the
+highest. You might hence want to invert the order of the CSV file before you
+make use of it.
+
+Lennart Poettering, 2009