CM3 - Speaker - No audio out of one channel

[JoeDat]

So, I've recently noticed that I'm not hearing audio out of one of the channels from the speaker.  It was hard to catch until I started playing games with stereo audio.  I don't have the problem when listening through headphones.  I think it's the right channel.  I've tried reseating the speaker cable and also reversing the plug.  Not sure how I can tell if the problem is with the speaker itself or the leads on the board.  Solder looks good.  Any ideas?  I was looking for a way to change the L/R balance to see if what sounds like no sound might be either faint or static, but not sure if this is possible.

[Flavor]

Hey JoeDat!

The speaker is actually just a single channel. The headphone jack has both channels. Some people have used asound.conf settings to try to get mixed audio out of the single speaker, but I don't know what settings work properly. I think that's what you'd want to do to get it to mix the channels. The unfortunate side-effect of this approach is that the headphone output would also be mixed, then.

[JoeDat]

Ahh, good to know!   I'll play around with the config and see if I can get something going.  If I'm successful, I'll share with the community.    If not, I can definitely live with it.  Thanks Flavor!!

[Flavor]

I tested this today: https://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4305

It seems to work, but I haven't tried it on any emulators yet. I only tested it with some command-line utilities that play audio/video files.

[JoeDat]

I tested this today: https://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4305

It seems to work, but I haven't tried it on any emulators yet.  I only tested it with some command-line utilities that play audio/video files.

I was JUST coming here to post the same article!.  Can confirm this 100% does the trick with emulators.  Thanks!

[Flavor]

I tested this today: https://sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4305

It seems to work, but I haven't tried it on any emulators yet.  I only tested it with some command-line utilities that play audio/video files.

I was JUST coming here to post the same article!.  Can confirm this 100% does the trick with emulators.  Thanks!

That's great news.  In the future, we may look into adding this as an option to allow the user to switch between true stereo and stereo-mixed mono.

[Slow Catalyst]

Seconding the notion of adding this as a selectable option. Just did this, and can now hear both channels to certain SNES games. Sure, an easy way around this is to set in-game options on a certain game to "mono", but that's on a by-game basis. If from the point of setup this were the configured setting, I think it may offer a more streamlined experience for the end-user.

Ed, I was thinking that in the RetroPie Config/Settings part of the EmulationStation menu where the FreePlay Brightness and Driver Settings are located, one single FreePlay folder collecting these things would be very tidy- taking cues from the Ez Hax Toolkit.

If there were a single "FreePlay Options" folder with
- FreePlay Display Brightness
- FreePlay Display Driver
- FreePlay Mono/Stereo Audio [scripting the above in as a toggle option]
- FreePlay HDMI Audio [adding the option to toggle audio to the HDMI-out to avoid having to mess with the config file- this would be really handy if changing on the fly, and wanted to go completely HDMI-out for A/V if say, at a friends house.]

This would be awesome. I may even get a headstart and try compiling all of that to one easy source in the RetroPie Settings within EmulationStation.

[Mootikins]

Just updated the repos and made a new one, so they should install to a folder now. If you want to do it yourself, just make a folder in /home/pi/RetroPie/retropiemenu named whatever you want, and move any scripts you want there. Then add menu items to /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml with the info you want. The audio tools repo is available at either github.com/theflav/freeplayaudiotools or github.com/mootikins/freeplayaudiotools, and the install makes the directory and adds the menu item for you.

[Slow Catalyst]

Thanks for that, Mootikins- works great!