Where is left/right balance setting?

[enigmaYmee]

I had been a long time gnome user (about 7-8 years) but because I can't stand gnome 3 I moved to KDE. Been using KDE for about 3 months now and I love it.

Now to my problem. Sometimes I'm listening to music at work and I only use 1 headphone because I still want to be able to hear people talking to me. Since I started using pulseaudio in gnome a few years ago I had been able to shift the sound from the right headphone to the left (so I can still hear all of the sound, basically just making it a mono headphone).

But I can't find an option for it in KDE, I've done many searches and can't find an answer to this. I know there has to be a way for me to shift the balance.

Anyone know of a way I can do that?

[Lord_Emsworth]

KMix should be able to do that. It is easiest if I just show a screenshot:

Right-click and Split Channels.

Depending on what you have in Systemsettings > Multimedia there'll be more channels; front, left, center ...

ETA: It works for each one of the playback streams too.

[enigmaYmee]

No that's not it. With that if I turn one channel all the way down, you just don't hear that channel. What I'm looking for it to move one channel over to the other channel. Like the balance setting of a car radio. Pulseaudio supports this, I used it all the time in gnome.

[enigmaYmee]

Let me give a specific example. In some songs where there are 2 singers, the sound from one singer will be in the left channel, and the sound from the other singer will be in the right channel. If I'm only using one headphone, then I only hear one singer. When I was using gnome I would open up the volume control app and slide the balance setting over and I would be able to hear both singers on that one headphone.

The option you mentioned above really has no effect because I don't have the right headphone in anyway. So it doesn't matter if I change the volume of the channel. I want to hear both left and right channels in one headphone.

[enigmaYmee]

Here is a screenshot of what I'm looking for. It's from Ubuntu 10.04. I clicked on the sound icon and selected settings.

[Lord_Emsworth]

No that's not it. With that if I turn one channel all the way down, you just don't hear that channel. What I'm looking for it to move one channel over to the other channel. Like the balance setting of a car radio. Pulseaudio supports this, I used it all the time in gnome.

Ah, I see now what you mean, but I have no idea where or if you do that. ETA: I have also looked over Pulse Audio's own volume control tool, but there is nothing there either.

[enigmaYmee]

I just remembered that when I moved to opensuse 12.1 I made a gnome VM of it just to check it out again. I booted it up just now to see if gnome still had that option. It does so here is a screen shot of openSuse 12.1 with Gnome 3.2:



There has to be a way to do this in KDE, right?

[evetsnameloc]

I'm not sure what you mean by the behavior of the balance control on a car radio. This does not move one channel to the other but it attenuates the volume on either side. The same effect can be had in KMix. Right click on the speaker widget in the notifications area and select "Restore". This will present you with the volume sliders. Right click on any of them and you can select "Split channels". This will let you control left and right volume selectively.

[evetsnameloc]

If you are trying to mix the left and right channels together you can try this:

Open a text editor and paste the following into it:

pcm.headphones {
  type route
  slave.pcm front
  slave.channels 2
  ttable {
    0.0 1
    0.1 1
    1.0 1
    1.1 1
    }
  hint {
    show on
    description "Mono headphones"
    }
  }

Save this to your home directory as ".asoundrc". You should then see "Mono headphones" in your list of sound devices in KMix (you might need to log out of KDE and then log back in to see it). You can then select this as your preferred device; or, alternatively, you can make it the default device by changing the first line to "pcm.!headphones".

I hope this is what you were asking.

[oboedad55]

I just remembered that when I moved to opensuse 12.1 I made a gnome VM of it just to check it out again. I booted it up just now to see if gnome still had that option. It does so here is a screen shot of openSuse 12.1 with Gnome 3.2:



There has to be a way to do this in KDE, right?

Yes, install pavucontrol and paprefs. They will give you pulseaudio volume/balance and preferences.