On 06 May, 2020 - S. wrote:

> Hi there, recently I've been running into major problems with Electron apps 
> for the Linux desktop (Microsoft Teams and Riot.im) modifying my mic input 
> levels. Also Chromium/Chrome do the same thing during WebRTC calls, they 
> raise my mic level to 100%, thus completely saturating the audio and making 
> it unusable. I drop it back down manually, but within a few seconds it creeps 
> back up to 100% again. In my case it tries to max out the mic gain, but I've 
> read lots of other user reports where it tries to lower the user's mic gain 
> to an unusable level.

I'm guessing that something doesn't report the right levels on your alsa
source. It's a tricky thing to measure and figure out where the bug
might be, but you can always look for obvious faults.

> 
> Sometimes this is the result of a "smart" VoIP program like Skype that has an 
> option to allow the program to adjust the audio device levels. But my problem 
> is that all my VoIP apps use WebRTC, which appears to include its own 
> implementation of AGC as part of the protocol, and it's obviously buggy in 
> anything based on Chromium (Chrome, electron apps, etc.), and there's no way 
> to disable it. There have been bug reports to Chrome(ium) for years about 
> this and they obviously don't care. Firefox doesn't exhibit this behavior, 
> but unfortunately a lot of WebRTC apps are either Electron (based on 
> Chromium) or else don't support Firefox very well. Ultimately, I think this 
> behavior should be controllable via PulseAudio, since we can never assume all 
> apps with have sane behavior.


Chrome AGC works just fine for alot of people in a bunch of different
scenarios. AGC over all can be a bit tricky but calling it "buggy in
anything based on Chromium" is a big stretch. Just because it doesn't
work as you expect doesn't mean that its broken for everyone.

> 
> In Windows there's an option to not allow programs to control a specific 
> device. I think we also desperately need a PulseAudio option to disable 
> direct access to the audio hardware. It appears this should be possible in 
> `/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf` by 
> changing `volume = merge` to `volume = off` or `volume = XX` according to 
> what I've read. But since the profiles are under `/usr/share/` they're 
> obviously not meant to be user configurable, which I think should be changed.
> 
> I'd really appreciate it if you could make this behavior user-configurable, 
> possibly by looking for the profiles somewhere under `/etc/pulse` and/or 
> `~/.config/pulse/`.
> 

I'd suggest a workaround, like loading a module-remap-source without a
remap, that just wraps your source, and then the AGC can pull that
source to 100% volume without touching the underlying source.


//Anton
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