ALSACTL(1) General Commands Manual ALSACTL(1)
NAME
alsactl - advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver
SYNOPSIS
alsactl [options] [store|restore|init] <card # or id or device>
alsactl monitor <card # or id>
alsactl [clean] <card # or id or device> [[control identifiers]]
DESCRIPTION
alsactl is used to control advanced settings for the ALSA soundcard
drivers. It supports multiple soundcards. If your card has features
that you can't seem to control from a mixer application, you have come
to the right place.
COMMANDS
Introduction
The <card> argument is optional. If no soundcards are specified, setup
for all cards will be saved, loaded or monitored.
store <card>
This command saves the current driver state for the selected soundcard
to the configuration file.
restore <card>
This command loads driver state for the selected soundcard from the
configuration file. If restoring fails (eventually partly), the init
action is called.
nrestore <card>
This command is like restore, but it notifies also the daemon to do new
rescan for available soundcards.
init <card>
This command tries to initialize all devices to a default state. If de-
vice is not known, error code 99 is returned.
daemon
This command manages to save periodically the sound state.
rdaemon
This command is like daemon but restore the sound state at first.
kill <cmd>
This command notifies the daemon to do the specified operation (quit,
rescan, save_and_quit).
monitor <card>
This command is for monitoring the events received from the given con-
trol device.
clean <card> [filter]
This command cleans the controls created by applications.
The optional element identifiers are accepted as a filter. One extra
argument is parsed as an element identifiers.
Example: alsactl clean 0 "name='PCM'" "name='Mic Phantom'"
dump-state
This command dumps the current state (all cards) to stdout.
dump-cfg
This command dumps the current configuration (all cards) to stdout.
Note that the configuration hooks are evaluated.
OPTIONS
-h, --help
Help: show available flags and commands.
-d, --debug
Use debug mode: a bit more verbose.
-v, --version
Print alsactl version number.
-f, --file
Select the configuration file to use. The default is
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state.
-a, --config-dir
Select the boot / hotplug ALSA configuration directory to use.
The default is /var/lib/alsa.
-l, --lock
Use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access to the
state file (this option is default for the global state file).
-L, --no-lock
Do not use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access
to the state file (including the global state file).
-O, --lock-state-file
Select the state lock file path.
-F, --force
Used with restore command. Try to restore the matching control
elements as much as possible. This option is set as default
now.
-g, --ignore
Used with store, restore and init commands. Do not show 'No
soundcards found' and do not set an error exit code when sound-
cards are not installed.
-P, --pedantic
Used with restore command. Don't restore mismatching control
elements. This option was the old default behavior.
-I, --no-init-fallback
Don't initialize cards if restore fails. Since version 1.0.18,
alsactl tries to initialize the card with the restore operation
as default. But this can cause incompatibility with the older
version. The caller may expect that the state won't be touched
if no state file exists. This option takes the restore behavior
back to the older version by suppressing the initialization.
-r, --runstate
Save restore and init state to this file. The file will contain
only errors. Errors are appended with the soundcard id to the
end of file.
-R, --remove
Remove runstate file at first.
-E, --env #=#
Set environment variable (useful for init action or you may
override ALSA_CONFIG_PATH to read different or optimized config-
uration - may be useful for "boot" scripts).
-i, --initfile
The configuration file for init. By default, PRE-
FIX/share/alsa/init/00main is used.
-p, --period
The store period in seconds for the daemon command.
-e, --pid-file
The pathname to store the process-id file in the HDB UUCP format
(ASCII).
-b, --background
Run the task in background.
-s, --syslog
Use syslog for messages.
-n, --nice
Set the process priority (see 'man nice')
-c, --sched-idle
Set the process scheduling policy to idle (SCHED_IDLE).
-D, --ucm-defaults
Execute also the 'defaults' section from the UCM configuration.
The standard behaviour is to execute only 'once' section.
-U, --no-ucm
Skip the UCM init even if available. It may be useful for the
test the legacy init configuration.
FILES
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state (or whatever file you specify with the -f
flag) is used to store current settings for your soundcards. The set-
tings include all the usual soundcard mixer settings. More impor-
tantly, alsactl is capable of controlling other card-specific features
that mixer apps usually don't know about.
The configuration file is generated automatically by running alsactl
store. Editing the configuration file by hand may be necessary for some
soundcard features (e.g. enabling/disabling automatic mic gain, digital
output, joystick/game ports, some future MIDI routing options, etc).
SEE ALSO
amixer(1), alsamixer(1), aplay(1), alsactl_init(7)
BUGS
None known.
AUTHOR
alsactl is by Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz> and Abramo Bagnara
<abramo@alsa-project.org>. This document is by Paul Winkler
<zarmzarm@erols.com>.
07 May 2014 ALSACTL(1)
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