I am so royaly @&%$ OFF at Debian that it's not even funny...

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2017 20:47:03 -0700
Eric Oyen <eric.oyen at icloud.com> wrote:

> um yeah. trying to get sound running under an OS without any kind of
> speech output or braille support can be a real trick. Not sure how I
> can do that without a sighted assistant (and no one in my pad
> qualifies as anything other than an appliance operator).

I have an idea that might work.

First, get rid of Pulseaudio. That thing has too many hard to find
mutes, and its interrelationships with ALSA and hardware are too
convoluted to easily troubleshoot. Run pure ALSA, using apulse for the
occasional thing that *must* have pulseaudio.

Now, exclusively use aplay, arecord, amixer and sound-test, every one
of which is CLI, to configure your sound. I'm assuming you have some
sort of way to read terminal output, because you participate on this
mailing list.

If you absolutely, positively refuse to get rid of Pulseaudio, the
following article might (or might not) be of service:

http://terokarvinen.com/2015/volume-control-with-pulseaudio-command-line-tools

I've been using Void Linux for about 18 months, and find it an
excellent distro to do things my way, which is usually the simple way.
With Void,  I'm able to do all necessary sound stuff with ALSA and the
occasional invocation of apulse. Void does an excellent job of letting
you configure your machine your way.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt
September 2017 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical
Troubleshooting Brand new, second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr