Balena sound working low when at 100

Product support
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#1

Hey everyone !

I have installed BalenaSound on 2 different RPi 3B+ and I have been able to use them as multiroom with portable speakers. However, I face a problem that seems to be not new but I could not find a solution.

When I control the master via bluetooth with my phone and put the volume at maximum on both speaker and phone, the outpout volume is still low. Much lower than if I were using the speaker at maximum volume without BalenaSound. I tried to set SYSTEM_OUTPUT_VOLUME at 100 or 98 and CONNECTION_NOTIFY_VOLUME at 100 with no success.

It seems than some people found a solution using Alsamixer but still with a lot of difficulties. Unfortunately, I have not found any ressource that explain how to install it.
BalenaOS 2.60.1+rev1.

Is someone able to help me or guide me to solve this ?

I thank you in advance for your help,
Vic.

#5

Hi Vic,

Can you let me know when you installed balenaSound, and whether you have updated the app by doing another deployment lately? I ask because balenaSound had a major update to use pulseaudio a few months ago.

Phil

#7

Hi Phil,

Thank you for your reply. I did it something like 3 months ago. Here is a screen of my dashboard.

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image1701×135 25.1 KB

Do you suggest to update something ?

Thanks,
Vic.

#8

It might be worth updating, yes, just to ensure that you are running the latest version. You can perform the upgrade easily by going to the balenaSound project on GitHub (https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound), scrolling down just a bit, and clicking the blue “Deploy with Balena” button. You will be taken to your balenaCloud dashboard in order to deploy it, and be given the option to deploy it to a new application, or, select from an existing application. Simply select your already existing balenaSound application, and wait for it to complete building and updating.

Let us know if that happens to resolve the issue, thanks.

#10

Hello David,
thank you for your help and sorry for this late response. I have just updated my application but nothing changed. Full volume is quite low.
Any clue of the reason ?

Thanks again !

#11

Hi

Was just wondering if the hardware setup is the same when you test the volume between balenaSound and non-balenaSound playback?
Could it be the case that the speaker is not getting enough power? This can happen if you are powering the speakers over USB from the Pi instead of a wall adapter for example