alsactl.1 (4825B)
1 .TH ALSACTL 1 "07 May 2014" 2 .SH NAME 3 alsactl \- advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver 4 5 .SH SYNOPSIS 6 7 \fBalsactl\fP [\fIoptions\fP] [\fIstore\fP|\fIrestore\fP|\fIinit\fP] <card # or id or device> 8 9 \fBalsactl\fP \fImonitor\fP <card # or id> 10 11 .SH DESCRIPTION 12 \fBalsactl\fP is used to control advanced settings for the ALSA 13 soundcard drivers. It supports multiple soundcards. If your card has 14 features that you can't seem to control from a mixer application, 15 you have come to the right place. 16 17 .SH COMMANDS 18 19 \fIstore\fP saves the current driver state for the selected soundcard 20 to the configuration file. 21 22 \fIrestore\fP loads driver state for the selected soundcard from the 23 configuration file. If restoring fails (eventually partly), the init 24 action is called. 25 26 \fInrestore\fP is like \fIrestore\fP, but it notifies also the daemon 27 to do new rescan for available soundcards. 28 29 \fIinit\fP tries to initialize all devices to a default state. If device 30 is not known, error code 99 is returned. 31 32 \fIdaemon\fP manages to save periodically the sound state. 33 34 \fIrdaemon\fP like \fIdaemon\fP but restore the sound state at first. 35 36 \fIkill\fP notifies the daemon to do the specified operation (quit, 37 rescan, save_and_quit). 38 39 \fImonitor\fP is for monitoring the events received from the given 40 control device. 41 42 If no soundcards are specified, setup for all cards will be saved, 43 loaded or monitored. 44 45 .SH OPTIONS 46 47 .TP 48 \fI\-h, \-\-help\fP 49 Help: show available flags and commands. 50 51 .TP 52 \fI\-d, \-\-debug\fP 53 Use debug mode: a bit more verbose. 54 55 .TP 56 \fI\-v, \-\-version\fP 57 Print alsactl version number. 58 59 .TP 60 \fI\-f, \-\-file\fP 61 Select the configuration file to use. The default is /var/lib/alsa/asound.state. 62 63 .TP 64 \fI\-l, \-\-lock\fP 65 Use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access to the state file (this 66 option is default for the global state file). 67 68 .TP 69 \fI\-L, \-\-no-lock\fP 70 Do not use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access to the state 71 file (including the global state file). 72 73 .TP 74 \fI\-O, \-\-lock-state-file\fP 75 Select the state lock file path. 76 77 .TP 78 \fI\-F, \-\-force\fP 79 Used with restore command. Try to restore the matching control elements 80 as much as possible. This option is set as default now. 81 82 .TP 83 \fI\-g, \-\-ignore\fP 84 Used with store and restore commands. Do not show 'No soundcards found' 85 and do not set an error exit code when soundcards are not installed. 86 87 .TP 88 \fI\-P, \-\-pedantic\fP 89 Used with restore command. Don't restore mismatching control elements. 90 This option was the old default behavior. 91 92 .TP 93 \fI\-I, \-\-no\-init\-fallback\fP 94 Don't initialize cards if restore fails. Since version 1.0.18, 95 \fBalsactl\fP tries to initialize the card with the restore operation 96 as default. But this can cause incompatibility with the older version. 97 The caller may expect that the state won't be touched if no state file 98 exists. This option takes the restore behavior back to the older 99 version by suppressing the initialization. 100 101 .TP 102 \fI\-r, \-\-runstate\fP 103 Save restore and init state to this file. The file will contain only errors. 104 Errors are appended with the soundcard id to the end of file. 105 106 .TP 107 \fI\-R, \-\-remove\fP 108 Remove runstate file at first. 109 110 .TP 111 \fI\-E, \-\-env\fP #=# 112 Set environment variable (useful for init action or you may override 113 ALSA_CONFIG_PATH to read different or optimized configuration - may be 114 useful for "boot" scripts). 115 116 .TP 117 \fI\-i, \-\-initfile\fP 118 The configuration file for init. By default, PREFIX/share/alsa/init/00main 119 is used. 120 121 .TP 122 \fI\-p, \-\-period\fP 123 The store period in seconds for the daemon command. 124 125 .TP 126 \fI\-e, \-\-pid-file\fP 127 The pathname to store the process-id file in the HDB UUCP format (ASCII). 128 129 .TP 130 \fI\-b, \-\-background\fP 131 Run the task in background. 132 133 .TP 134 \fI\-s, \-\-syslog\fP 135 Use syslog for messages. 136 137 .TP 138 \fI\-n, \-\-nice\fP 139 Set the process priority (see 'man nice') 140 141 .TP 142 \fI\-c, \-\-sched-idle\fP 143 Set the process scheduling policy to idle (SCHED_IDLE). 144 145 .SH FILES 146 \fI/var/lib/alsa/asound.state\fP (or whatever file you specify with the 147 \fB\-f\fP flag) is used to store current settings for your 148 soundcards. The settings include all the usual soundcard mixer 149 settings. More importantly, alsactl is 150 capable of controlling other card-specific features that mixer apps 151 usually don't know about. 152 153 The configuration file is generated automatically by running 154 \fBalsactl store\fP. Editing the configuration file by hand may be 155 necessary for some soundcard features (e.g. enabling/disabling 156 automatic mic gain, digital output, joystick/game ports, some future MIDI 157 routing options, etc). 158 159 .SH SEE ALSO 160 \fB 161 amixer(1), 162 alsamixer(1), 163 aplay(1), 164 alsactl_init(7) 165 \fP 166 167 .SH BUGS 168 None known. 169 170 .SH AUTHOR 171 \fBalsactl\fP is by Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz> and Abramo Bagnara 172 <abramo@alsa\-project.org>. This document is by Paul Winkler <zarmzarm@erols.com>.