Gnome: control audio volume via the keyboard
 

Hello.

Gnome has a funcionality that allows to set the volume using a key combo. A little OSD is shown on the screen when you do this and it seems to work. However when I do this with the mixer window open I can see that it modifies the "Front" channel, which on my setup is used for nothing. I'd rather like it to modify the "PCM" channel, which is what I use as a Master volume.

I wanted to know whether it's possible to change the change the channel that these keys act upon. The little volume applet has this capability, I just change it to PCM and it works like a charm. I wonder if there's a similar setting I can configure for the keyboard bindings functionality.

Something to consider is that I don't use pulseaudio (disabled at compile time, globally). I use plain ALSA.

I'm not sure if there's a better way to do what you want, but there's an easy workaround :) Install "amixer" (sudo apt-get install amixer), and then you can use the custom shortcuts in GNOME: run "gconf-editor" then go to "/apps/metacity/global_keybindings" and add the shortcut you want to use as the key for run_command_1, then go to "/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands" and enter "amixer set PCM 10+" into the command_1 key value. Then, hopefully, whenever you press the shortcut it should raise the PCM volume level by 10 decibels. Similarly, you could set command_2 as "amixer set PCM 10-" to lower the volume. Hope this helps :)

I can use external tools like amixer, I've done it in the past under other WMs, I was just curious if there's a way to use the gnome builtin OSD-ish tool. Thanks for trying though. I appreciate it :)