lae's notebook

Increasing Maximum Volume with ALSA

Since I don't have a set of monitors for my desktop, I use a pair of headphones often as speakers for audio. This setup usually is insufferable because of low audio, though mplayer has a "softvol" plugin that lets you increase your sound output's decibel level - and since I hardly needed sound for anything other than music or video, this solution worked perfectly (of course, for anything else I could put on my headphones).

That solution sufficed for me until recently, and I found out ALSA actually has a softvol plugin that lets you set max_dB (usually 0 by default). This can be done in /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc with the following definitions:

pcm.softvol {
        type softvol
        slave.pcm "cards.pcm.default"
        control {
                name "Software"
                card 0
        }
        max_dB 20.0
}
pcm.!default {
        type            plug
        slave.pcm       "softvol"
}

Depending on your configuration, the line slave.pcm "cards.pcm.default" and card 0 may need modification - you can run aplay -Ll to list your devices and card indices. Changes will take effect upon restarting applications that use sound.

This will create a "Software" control in applications like alsamixer, which will let you increase the decibel level up to 20dB (though there isn't any indication of what the decibel level is at other than percentages). Since I didn't specify min_dB, it defaults to -51dB.

You can also control the left and right channels independently, which is useful when you need volume to be louder in one speaker or headphone in a stereo setup.