External sound control for balenaSound Raspberry Pi

Hi everyone,

I have recently set-up my rPi 4 with a hifiberry amp+ and balenasound. Everything is working fine and the sound quality is really good.

I am completely new to this kind of project but enjoy learning about the topic and like a challenge!

I know it is possible to use a rotary encoder connected to the GIPO pins on the rPi as an external volume control nob for other music applications such as volumio. Can a similar thing be used for Balena sound? And if so can anyone point me in the right direction so I can learn how to do it?

Thanks
Joe

Hello Joe, welcome to the forums, I’m glad you are enjoying balenaSound!

Regarding your question, it’s currently not possible to have a fine grained volume control as you describe. This is something that we implemented already but due to the current architecture of balenaSound it just doesn’t work as we would want it to. The next major version of balenaSound will fix this among other things; it’s still a work in progress with no clear release date, but it should be coming in the next few months.

I created a GitHub issue with this feature request. If you are interested you can read a bit more details on this topic in there: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/issues/195 I’ve also linked the issue to this thread so when it gets implemented you will automatically be notified about it.

Lastly, I don’t know if you saw this already, but you can set output volume digitally via an environment variable. I know this is not really what you had in mind, but perhaps it’s useful. You can read more about how to do this in our docs: https://sound.balenalabs.io/docs/customizations/#set-output-volumes