ATR4697-USB mic needs alsamixer to set auto gain control, how to on Home Assistant OS on PI5?

Development
1

Hi Fellow HA Users,

Summary: How can we turn on AGC for our ATR4697 mic when using HA OS on RPI 5? alsamixer is what we use on other distros.

Long Version:

Having fun with HA so far, it’s replacing our Smarthings+Alexa very well. Thanks so much to the HA developers and community for all the software, docs, and excellent tutorial videos.

Using an Audio-Technica ATR4697-USB Omnidirectional Condenser Boundary Microphone as a mic, and HDMI for speakers, we were able to get the Assist Microphone, Open Wake Word, Whisper and Piper addons to work as a pretty good voice assistant in a supervised install on a PC with Debian.

We had to use alsamixer to set the mic’s Auto Gain Control (AGC) on so that the mic would work well from a distance. If the AGC is not on, you must be near the mic.

We then switched to a Home Assistant OS install on a Raspberry PI and got the same addons working. Unfortunately we have to be close to the mic for it to work because AGC is not enabled. HA OS doesn’t have alsamixer.

How can we enable AGC on this mic from HA OS?

If I understand correctly, HA OS is a Debian-based distro for PI? Can we install packages somehow?

Is there an alternative to alsamixer?

The HA volume settings don’t offer an AGC enabled flag that worked for us.

Thank you for taking the time to read and help!
Nick

2

Hi npcostes,

No, you can’t install packages. Well you can, but you run an OS update and they are all gone, so you really cannot.
This is the type of thing that probably has to run in an add-on or something if you need drivers.

I will move this to the developer category here in case someone there knows something else. There is also the HA discord that has a developer forum area as well.

3

It was a an Alpine Linux distro.
Alpine might be a Debian variant though.