Bluetooth Audio Volume

[p310don]

Hey all,

Is there a way to control the volume when listening via Bluetooth?

I have a portable speaker, which has it's own volume control, so that's great, but I also have recently procured some wireless earbuds. They're pretty neat, but have no volume control, so listening to music, or playing games with those in can only be done at full volume.

I can control volume from youtube or vlc or withing whatever program I'm using, but the master volume control does nothing for bluetooth.

[don570]

Did you try typing 'retrovol' in terminal
and experiment with the sliders.

I believe I had success by using the commandline
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... nge-volume

Code: Select all

You can use amixer. It's in the alsa-utils package on Ubuntu and Debian.

Run amixer without parameters to get an overview about your controls for the default device.

You can also use alsamixer without parameters (from the same package) to get a more visual overview. Use F6 to see and switch between devices. Commonly, you might have PulseAudio and a hardware sound card to select from.

Then use amixer with the set command to set the volume. For example, to set the master channel to 50%:

amixer set Master 50%
Master is the control name and should match one that you see when running without parameters.

Note the % sign, without it, it will treat the value as a 0 - 65536 level.

If PulseAudio is not your default device, you can use the -D switch:

amixer -D pulse set Master 50%
Other useful commands pointed out in the comments:

To increase/decrease the volume use +/- after the number, use

amixer set Master 10%+
amixer set Master 10%-

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[p310don]

Thanks @don570

The bottom slider, SOFTPCM adjusts the bluetooth volume.

[dr__Dan]

Here's another way to do the same thing, especially for those who don't have much experience with Fatdog64.

Right click on the Volume Control icon and choose Configure "Volume Control". It may not show all the options available, such as if you have connected a Bluetooth device, so in the pop-up window, click the radio button for OSS, then reselect the ALSA radio button; this will refresh the list of available devices to control. The default device can be changed to any of them. I did it just now, and the softPCM and a few others showed up after the refresh.

I think the volume control in the panel is an LXQT plugin (Fatdog team correct me if I'm mistaken please) that is not easily modified by this user, but it would benefit from an automatic refresh feature. I don't know just when a refresh should occur, or how often, but I didn't learn the above trick for a long time, and it would have been handy.

Dan

[p310don]

Thanks @dr__Dan

I'd played with configure volume control, but had never done the click back and forth bit to get the right bit up. @jamesbond new feature request

[jamesbond]

To add: If you open terminal and run alsamixer when your bluetooth is connected (and you have configured your soundcard accordingly - either direct Bluetooth device, bmixd, or aloopd), you should be able to see the volume control there.

Here's a screenshot from el-cheapo bluetooth boombox from K-mart:

xscreenshot-20240721T194917.png (33.22 KiB) Viewed 586 times