How can I limit max volume for a sound card?

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Hello! I’m currently running EndeavourOS with Plasma and pipewire as my audio server. Unfortunately, my specific laptop (HP Chromebook x360 14" (SONA) with coreboot and endeavour OS only) has a known issue where you can overdrive and blow out your speakers. As such, it is on me to ensure that I limit volume to avoid damaging my laptop.

Ideally, I’d love to set up a limit so that within plasma-pa or with my keyboard keys, I cannot raise the volume past 20% or so when using that sink. (or allowing 0-100% in plasma-pa and limiting it further in the chain). Unfortunately, I am struggling to find a solution to this problem.

I originally thought that maybe it could be limited within plasma. It seems that plasma-pa used to have a set volume limit function, but in 2020 it was replaced with a toggle to enable boosted volume (100-150%), thus removing the ability to limit the volume to less than 100%.

The question is, where is the best place for me to try and limit the volume output? Is this something I should be looking into within pipewire? Or since I only want to limit the built-in speakers, does that mean I should be looking into limiting volume output at the alsa level?

Any pointers would be much appreciated, as I’m relatively inexperienced with linux audio.

Thanks!

2

Try alsamixer, press f6 choose card and lower the volume. I had to do the opposite (sound too low) recently.

1 Like
3

An emergency workaround. It’s not elegant I admit.
yay -S pulsemixer
Put into autostart this script:

#!/bin/bash
systemctl --user stop pipewire.socket
sleep 2
systemctl --user stop pipewire.service
sleep 1
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket

and schedule a command periodically
pulsemixer --change-volume +5 --max-volume 50

4

Thanks for the suggestion, but even when I select the specific sound card to lower the volume there, it stays linked to plasma-pa. In other words, I could try to limit my sound card’s output t0 50% in alsamixer but then I can just scroll over the volume applet and turn it right back up to 100%.