Has something changed? Volume is ultra low now...

[microfx]

Hey!

I didn't change anything in my setup. But somehow the volume is not even at max not very loud (usually at max everything my ears would be deaf and police would arrive within 20 min and I'd get arrested for war crimes – I hope you get the point).

I know I set max volume to -6 dB / pipewire is capped at 0.7. I know I can unlock that part. Just very curious if it's maybe a hickup somewhere else since I cannot find anything in my pipeline that is the reason...

Am I the only one? Did Apple change something in 26.5 that is causing this? This is on macOS and iOS.

Cheers

[mikebrady]

Hmm, I don’t think anything has changed. But I understand PipeWire allows you to control the volume of individual sources (e.g. music players) as well as the overall volume. Could that have anything to do with it?

[microfx]

Okay.. found the time to track the problem down... it was probably WirePlumber caching volume... Anyhow... maybe this tiny write up can help someone else:

1. Double Attenuation: shairport-sync applied a digital -6 dB safety cap, while WirePlumber silently cached the stream's previous volume level at 77% ( -6.96 dB ) in its restore database. Both attenuations multiplied, causing a massive volume drop.

2. Missing Mixer Mapping: The configuration line mixer_control_name = "Shairplay"; was missing, which prevented shairport-sync from successfully passing client volume commands (like mute/0) to the PipeWire stream control.

3. Orphaned Processes: Old instances of shairport-sync renamed their main thread to (convolver) in Linux, escaping standard pkill cleanups and keeping the audio session locked on the broken state.

...also this convolver name drives me crazy everytime I read it. Is this because it's "bleeding edge" dev branche? ... I'd love to see it named like shairport-convolver or something so I know "ah, it's from shairport - I won't be scared!"

[mikebrady]

Very useful, thanks.

“Convolver” is the name of a pthread that actually is — guess what — a convolver thread 🙂. The real problem is how pkill identifies the program. The -f option might help.