Low ringtone volume on phone calls about ubuntu-touch

That Must be correct, low audio on ring tone to incoming calls, but audio works fine when playing sounds or music, it is low just when is used by incoming calls.

[UniversalSuperBox]

This seems to be related to #81. The media and notification volumes are separate, but that is not immediately obvious in the interface. I can turn music way down but leave notification volume way up and still get blasted by the incoming call ringtone.

[nikolaslada]

I report bug for my friend Filip Moc who does not own GitHub account.

I experienced this issue too on Farphone 2. But other devices might be affected as well. This is definitely not related to #81. Ringtone volume can be controlled but even when set to maximum it is still too silent. Playing media is loud just fine. Problem seems to be in telepathy-ofono which reroutes sound also to top (ear) speaker when ringing. This reduces maximum volume a lot even though sound still keeps coming from main (back) speaker too. Even when playing some audio using some independent player such as mpv volume of player gets reduced a lot when phone starts ringing on incoming call and reverts back to loud after hangup.

Workaround I use now:

• Download source from https://github.com/ubports/telepathy-ofono to phone
• Open file connection.cpp, find function enable_ringtone and comment out this line:
  • QPulseAudioEngine::instance()->setCallMode(CallRinging, AudioModeWiredOrSpeaker);
• Compile (mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make -j4)
• Replace or symlink file /usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-ofono to new compiled binary
• Kill telepathy-ofono (it should restart automatically)

[casimir7]

I have this issue too, also on FP2 (OTA-8). Could this be fixed upstream (maybe by implementing nikolaslada's workaround?).
I was also wondering about UniversalSuperBox's comment. On my device, there is only ONE volume setting which globally sets all audio output levels. It might be a good idea in the future to implement separate levels for ringing, messages, and media output.

[UniversalSuperBox]

@nikolaslada, can you propose that change in a PR to telepathy-ofono?

[MK1973]

I would like to confirm that in my N5, the ringtone is really very silent. have to move volume over 50% to avoid missing calls. I have this experience since the beginning, and on all channels , stable, rc, devel.

[UniversalSuperBox]

@MK1973, that doesn't seem to be the same problem. The volume does not seem significantly different between media and call on my Nexus 5. Try to set both your media and notification volume to the same value, then start playing some music. Call yourself and see how the volumes differ. Note that the default ringtones in Ubuntu Touch are mixed a little low, at least compared to the music I played them against (I tested this by listening to both using headphones on my PC). If you think that the volume below 50% is lower than what you expect it to be, we might have an issue of opinion (and that's why there's a volume slider, after all :P).

There is a very clear difference in volume on the FP2. It seems like the ringtone starts playing through the loudspeaker AND the earpiece at the same time -- which is kind of neat, I suppose, if they weren't too quiet.

[nikolaslada]

Update from my friend Filip:

I did some further investigation and so far it is certain that telepathy-ofono is not causing the problem. It just changes output port to output-speaker+wired_headphone as expected which should route ringtone to embedded speaker and wired output. Problem seems to be somewhere in pulseaudio which interprets output-speaker+wired_headphone in some strange way causing ringtone to be routed also to earpiece and limiting volume. I don't know much about pulseaudio so I have not much idea how to debug this. You can reproduce the problem using these commands:

$ pactl set-sink-port sink.primary output-speaker+wired_headphone
$ pactl set-sink-port sink.primary output-speaker

While with output-speaker volume is loud just fine with output-speaker+wired_headphone volume gets dropped.
You can check which output port is currently selected using this command:
$ pacmd info | grep 'active port'

Workaround with recompiling telepathy-ofono worked for me for some time but it doesn't work anymore. There seems to be something else switching output to port output-speaker+wired_headphone. I'm now using this hacky workaround which hides output-speaker+wired_headphone and seems to be working reliably even with unmodified telepathy-ofono.

# mount -o remount,rw /
# cd /usr/lib/pulse-8.0
# cp -ai modules modules_bak
# cd modules
# sed -i 's/output-speaker+wired_headphone/outpu--speaker+wired_headphone/g' *
# reboot

(I guess restarting pulseaudio instead of reboot should be enough, but I didn't try)

[LlamasJM]

I have this issue too, FP2 OTA 10.

[c4pp4]

It just changes output port to output-speaker+wired_headphone as expected which should route ringtone to embedded speaker and wired output.

Maybe appropriate acdb_id could fix the issue. The same problem (low ringtone) was when using Sony Xperia X, it was resolved via this PR fredldotme/device-sony-loire#3